Data-Driven Imperative
Wayne Eckerson sees businesses pursuing three objectives with big data: understanding the past, improving the present, and predicting the future. He notes that we’re increasingly surrounded by data-driven smart systems that are reshaping the way we work and the economy we work in. In this video, Wayne Eckerson explores why businesses are investing so heavily and what they hope to accomplish.
Hi, everyone. I’m here to talk to you today about the value of data analytics. Companies all over the world are investing millions of dollars in data and analytics. So, what’s the upshot? Well, there are three things.
One, they apply data and analytics to understand the past, for instance, which campaigns in our marketing department have provided the best return. We’ve been doing that for many, many years.
Second, they want to optimize the present. This is where we find information from the past to understand how we can do things better today, such as which packaging of our product provides the best lift in sales? How can we optimize our store layouts and shelf layouts in a store to optimize revenue?
And, finally, you want to mine historical data also to predict the future. Which customers are likely to respond to this offer? Which machine on our factory floor is likely to break? These are the three main values that data and analytics can provide organizations.
But, frankly, the use of data and the use of analytics is permeating all facets of our organizations, helping us to improve the way we interact with customers, the way we manage our supply chain, the way we optimize our workforce and improve productivity, how we optimize our operations, identify bottlenecks and adapt quickly to changes in the environment and how we reduce risk and others.
Frankly, many companies are using data and analytics kind of a solve to intuition or decisions made by gut feel alone. We’re moving now to the world and realm of data driven decision-making and data driven organizations. And that means balancing art and science. Art or gut feel and intuition experiential decisions is very important, at times our intuition and our gut feel is very accurate, but in many cases it’s not. That’s when we need data to validate what we think is right.
At the same time we also need our intuition to validate the data because sometimes the data can lead us astray. Research has shown that the best decisions come from balancing intuition with data.
Finally, we’re also seeing data and analytics at the center of these new emerging digital ecosystems where analytics is creating a real-time digital fabric that connects people to materials, products, processes and machines to create an environment in which we can learn from and adapt to new events so we can automate processes and we can make people more productive by giving them the information they need at the time they need it.
And this type of digital ecosystem is emerging in many types of industries from smart manufacturing to the sharing economy epitomized by Uber and Lyft, to the digital battlefield. We’re now fighting wars digitally using data and analytics at the core to coordinate our weapons, as well as our soldiers, both on the ground and in the air. Also, smart buildings and smart cars and traffic with autonomous cars being at the center of these perhaps someday.
So, data analytics is becoming not just reshaping the way our organizations work, but also our economy and even our society itself.
