Six Ways to Make Smarter Decisions

The advent of data and analytics has opened the doors to smarter, more progressive decisions. Basic business decisions related to profitability and other facets of the business process can significantly benefit from the use of data and analytics. 

The presence of data and analysis tools has changed the way decisions are taken. Not only have they provided greater room for reasoning, but they’ve also ensured a more authentic process for decision-making. Now that we have entered this stage of heightened reasoning, we have finally realized how much we can improve decision-making through the use of data and analysis. 

Here, we look at six ways to drive smarter and more authentic decisions. 

1. Combine Solutions to Drive Innovations 

Most executives, analytics leaders, and managers can combine solutions to drive innovation forward. The use of data and analysis technologies to handle processes and strategies is the call of the day. By working with AI tools and other analysis algorithms, you can actually catapult your organization onto the digital bandwagon. The best way forward is to realize the need for combining solutions in order to derive and drive innovations. 

2. Plan and Report: Enabling Agile and Continuous Planning

Most finance professionals, executives, business users, and analytic leaders can benefit from budgeting, forecasting financial closing and reporting processes. The use of flexible analysis and automated visualizations help you to uncover new insights and work with them, improving the management of financial and operational matters. This leads to better financial planning for the future years, with increased consideration of budgetary needs and requirements. 

3. Explore and Visualize: Build Reports, Dashboards, and Visualizations 

Most business analysts, IT administrators and business users can benefit from the ability to explore and visualize dashboards, visualizations and reports. Today’s user demands their BI solution provide enhanced dashboarding and reporting, while maintaining the security and scalability that is essential for a self-service world. 

4. Predict and Optimize: Examine, Model and Implement

Most data science managers, data analysts, business analysts and business users can predict and optimize efficiently by learning to develop and deliver visible contributions to the business. These contributions are to be developed with a portfolio of prescriptive, predictive and Machine Learning tools for both coders and non-coders. Once the contributions have been developed, the organization can put the products into deployment faster. This cuts any downtimes involved in the process, and leads towards better predictions. 

5. Manage: Managing your Data 

Business users and IT professionals can manage data proficiently by adopting a future hybrid data management approach, which is complemented by analytical and operational workloads in order to optimize large, diverse data volumes, and to uncover actionable insights driven by data. All of this is to be done while remaining compatible with the present systems. The management of data is important for the overall decision making process, as it will bring forth better insights. 

6. Trust: Form a Trusted Analytics Foundation

Most chief data analytics officers, data architects, data engineers and chief marketing officers can implement methods to help organizations know, trust, and use the data built on an analytics foundation with unified governance and integration. This helps information stakeholders to find both unstructured and structured high-quality data from any multi-cloud environment. 

Be up to date with the best practices, industry stories, and innovative learning in order to achieve proficiency in decision making. Register for IBM Analytics University 2018, to learn from experts including Anna Rosling R?nnlund, Co-founder and Vice President, at Gapminder.

Ronald is an IBM Analytics partner, but all opinions expressed are his own.