Managing the unexpected

Chris Norton at InterSystems argues that it’s vital business leaders find ways of coping with volatility and uncertainty fast, and encourage a culture of innovation by putting data and analytics power in the hands of frontline business teams

Political conflicts and trade tensions, along with extreme weather and the continuing after-effects of the pandemic – it all makes for a volatile cocktail of pressures that major businesses must cope with. Few would have predicted that interest rates would rise so steeply in the developed world, or that inflation would prove to be so stubborn, yet everyone has to adapt.

With instability and uncertainty on the cards for the foreseeable future, organisations need to look deep inside their data and processes to understand exactly what is happening in the moment to swiftly predict and respond to changes.

In other words, they need to use data so they become far more agile. In almost every sector, businesses know that to do this they must innovate.

A survey of senior business leaders across healthcare, financial services, fintechs, supply chain, and education found 74 per cent took the view that innovation is vital to their organisation’s success. More than half said agility was one of the key drivers of innovation.

The opportunities are out there but they demand new approaches to the management, and extraction of insight and value, from data. Organisations must become more data-driven at every level.

Talent shortages will remain a problem

However, talent shortages and growing data complexities are creating data-related bottlenecks with IT or developer teams, delaying further innovation across business units. Organisations are battling resource constraints and struggle to implement innovative approaches to decision intelligence. More than a third of organisations (35 per cent) cite the skills shortage as the biggest roadblock to success.

A report to the UK parliament cites a study showing 178,000 vacancies in data specialist roles in the country, with the supply of data scientists from domestic universities unlikely to exceed 10,000 annually. The Financial Times reports that data from 13,000 employers collated by recruitment firm Hays UK shows almost all employers had experienced tech skills shortages in 2022.

The volume of useful data available to almost every business is expanding by the second. And so many businesses find that as the data they need to analyse keeps increasing, it is pouring into vast, separated silos. Without the right skills and underlying technology, it is very difficult to bring all this information together for meaningful analysis.

Self-service analytics

However, there is no longer any reason for organisations to be overwhelmed by the volume of data and their lack of expertise. Self-service capabilities increase organisational agility and enable every business user to make data-driven decisions, regardless of their technical skillset.

This may sound ambitious but advances in data management technology mean the non-specialist can now prepare data and ensure they and their teams have access to information that is of the right quality, accuracy, integrity, and timeliness.

Automation has progressed to reduce the routine and repetitive burdens involved in data preparation. Thanks to innovative data fabric architectures, lines-of-business – frontline users – can interrogate live or historical data in any system or silo without having to rely on the time of hard-pressed IT or scarce data engineers and scientists.

The data can stay where it is – with no need to implement yet more systems or undergo a vast programme of replacement. Frontline decision-makers can get answers to the business questions that will have the greatest positive impact on their work, or that of their team. They can use business intelligence and data visualisation tools to make complex answers easily understood. Interactive and multi-dimensional analysis no longer depends on the availability of IT data expertise.

Freed from much of the routine work and answering the plethora of business requests, data engineers can devote more time to the truly complex work including creation of new data assets.

An important shift in power and capability

With access to on-demand analytics, lines-of-business can identify how to change and adapt to new pressures and opportunities much faster. Innovation and agility become part of the mindset.

Access to live data and diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive insights enables supply chain organisations to react fast to disruptions, rerouting, resupplying, or adopting alternative strategies that maximise important fulfilment metrics without compromising profitability or efficiency in other areas.

For example, in financial services, self-service analytics tools not only enable front and back-office teams to drill down into live data and ask ad hoc questions, they can create their own dashboards and reporting screens.

Frontline users have access to more sources of data and to insights that drive important investment decisions, based on what may be masses of trading data and market information. They can predict what could happen next by performing analytics on fast-moving transactional data.

Doing nothing is inadvisable

The dangers for enterprises lagging behind in self-service data and analytics functionalities are in reduced agility and competitiveness. Organisations in this predicament may well find the threat of shadow data silos emerging as line-of-business users experiment outside governed environments.

Frustrations can mount and employees who can see what needs to be done may take matters into their own hands, with all adverse data governance and IT consequences such uncoordinated DIY approaches entail.

As its competitors give their frontline teams capabilities that enable them to make faster, better, and more far-reaching decisions, a business that is stuck with overflowing data silos is always going to lose out. Unable to bring all the relevant data together in a timely and effective manner that delivers frontline value, it will steadily fall behind.

By enabling their business users to gain new, more advanced self-service data and analytics capabilities, businesses will significantly improve their agility in an age of uncertainty

Chris Norton is Managing Director, InterSystems UK & Ireland

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com