Working for Data?
Picture this, the year is 1999...in offices all around the world people are inputting, copying and pasting tables and numbers into spreadsheets to gain an understanding of the state of their business. Some people have pivot tables and even charts that they update with information from emails they've received or even exports from IT systems...
At this time, spreadsheets were everywhere and people took pride in their ability to develop complex formulas and analysis. They spent a long, long time building and maintaining them. For many people, most of their day was spent working to pull data together and finalise numbers that were accurate (assuming there were 0 human errors).
Back then, alternative options were limited and most organisations spent an inordinate amount of time compiling data and turning it into usable information.
The Present Day
So, back to the future - these days, most organisations have automated the process of collecting and consolidating the data that is important to their business. They have analytics to identify the insightful pieces of information and to distribute these insights and alerts to the right people in real-time on any device....don't they?
Absolutely not, the majority of organisations are still working way too hard for their data. They are still manually compiling inaccurate data and sending this out-of-date information by email to people that probably won't read the majority of it. So, why would you do this?
The Ugly Truth
The reasons vary as to why companies still manually collect, organise and share their information, but these are the top 5 (in my view):
- Comfort, "it's the way that we've always did it and it works for us."
- Fear, "if the thing I spend most of my day doing is automated - what will I do?".
- Expense, "technology is expensive and it will take time to train our people".
- Busy, "we don't have the time to introduce a new way of doing things".
- Unaware, "I didn't know that you could do this".
I hope that anyone reading this article understands just how short-sighted these reasons are. There are lots of examples where this type of thinking has led to business failure, the loss of customers as well as the missed opportunity to reduce costs and/or increase revenue.
A lot of companies are aware of the importance of data, but dont know where to focus
to get the most value, or how to translate the data into actionable insight.
Putting Data to Work
The companies that are "Data-Driven" use technology that lets them know of changes in their business that are insightful - enabling them to take action, early.
For instance, a notification to a sales manager ahead-of-time that the actual sales for a particular customer is substantially below the forecast for the period along with a prediction on the final figure (based on current activity).
Another example is automatically adjusting the price of goods based on competitor pricing or environmental factors, removing the need for manual monitoring or human input.
The most basic level of being Data-Driven is the automation of business reporting, whether they are financial, operational or board packs - most, if not all of the effort involved can be easily automated.
Conclusion
In summary, there really are limitless scenarios where DATA can work for YOU.
If you recognise yourself or your company reflected in this article then it may be worth looking at making a change, remember 1999 was 2 decades ago...
If you're interested in understanding what has happened since, this article is worth a read Data to Big Data to 'Just' Data. If you think you're ready to change get in touch.