Achieving data quality excellence

Jon Payne at InterSystems explores how to move beyond the buzzword of analytics

In today’s corporate landscape, the potential of harnessing analytic capabilities is widely acknowledged as a game-changer for organisations.

Alongside powerful artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business intelligence tools, analytics helps businesses to not just understand historical data, but also to predict future trends, automate decision-making processes, and obtain actionable insights. This allows businesses to increase efficiency and accuracy, and enables them to adopt more sophisticated data-driven strategies to drive their enterprise forward.

Understandably, this makes analytics a compelling proposition. However, embarking on an analytics journey can be a daunting task.

The allure of numerous tools and the large number of benefits on offer can often lead businesses to dive headfirst into tactics without having a clear strategy in place. While tempting, this frequently results in limited success and a disappointing return on investment (ROI).

Instead of rushing into analytics use without a roadmap, business leaders should take a more strategic approach. The most effective way to leverage analytics is to identify individual use cases that will deliver the greatest strategic value to their organisation and then scale the implementation from there. But, even identifying which use case to start with can be tricky, which is why there are a few steps that can be taken to help.

Are you asking the right questions?

As a starting point, business leaders should ask themselves a series of questions, the answers to which will help to guide their analytics journey and pinpoint where it can have the greatest impact. The first question should be, where in the organisation would you feel the most benefit from analytic capabilities? And, how would implementing analytics in this use case support your strategic business objectives? This should take into considerations things like future growth or, perhaps, sustainability requirements.

Taking a step back to look at the bigger picture will help you to understand which use cases are the most fundamental to achieving your business objectives. This approach will ultimately help to ensure that analytics applications yield better, more impactful results in both the long- and short-term.

Another important question to ask is, what people, process, and technology capabilities are required to support these use cases? Data is fundamental to any analytics initiative, so a robust data strategy and the technology for acquiring clean, healthy, real-time data are essential. After all, analytics need to be fed good, clean data to produce good results.

Enterprises are increasingly turning to smart data fabrics to streamline their analytics efforts and meet their people, process, and technology needs. The smart data fabric accesses, transforms, and harmonises data from multiple sources, on demand, to make it usable and actionable for a wide variety of business applications.

Embedded analytics capabilities, including data exploration, business intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning, within the fabric makes it faster and easier for organisations to gain new insights and power intelligent predictive and prescriptive services and applications.

Self-service capabilities enable every business user to interrogate live data to make timely and accurate data-driven decisions, regardless of their technical skillset. Consequently, business leaders can discern which use cases would benefit most from analytics and implement them strategically.

The strategic advantage

Taking this strategic approach empowers business leaders to use analytics as a cornerstone of their decision-making process. In the supply chain sector, for example, this may look like having the ability to predict disruption and opportunity in real-time, allowing business leaders to re-route or resupply at the drop of a hat.

Meanwhile, for business leaders in the financial services industry, analytics capabilities can help them obtain the actionable insights and transparency needed to reduce risk, develop new products and revenue sources faster, and ensure compliance with ever-changing regulatory requirements.

While it is clear there is a wealth of use cases that analytics could be applied to, this focused approach enables business leaders to demonstrate the tangible benefits and ROI of each individual analytics application. It also helps businesses to learn from each application and understand whether the initial use case be replicated or scaled. Insights and lessons learnt can then be applied to subsequent use cases.

By following these steps, organisations can establish the foundation for future enterprise-wide analytics success.

Wave goodbye to one-size-fits-all

Applying analytics capabilities on a case-by-case basis yields greater ROI compared to a one-size-fits-all approach. Over time, this access to on-demand analytics empowers businesses to adapt quickly to disruptions and anticipate future trends. This adaptability, in turn, fosters a culture of innovation and agility.

Ultimately, the most effective way to harness the potential of analytics is for business leaders to adopt a strategic mindset.  Identifying and prioritising individual use cases that align with strategic objectives and scaling their implementation is the key to unlocking the full potential of analytics and ensuring long-term success in today’s dynamic business environment.

However, business leaders must remember that the success of analytics hinges on the integrity of the data used. The reliance of analytics on high-quality, clean data cannot be overstated. Inferior data quality directly translates to subpar analytics outcomes.

Therefore, it is imperative for businesses to invest in the necessary technology and processes to ensure their data is clean, harmonised, and being shown in real-time. Such a commitment to data health is essential to extract the maximum value from analytics and equipping organisations with actionable insights for informed decision-making,

Jon Payne is director of sales engineering and education at InterSystems

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com