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Tackling global uncertainties using data

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Chris Norton at InterSystems UK & Ireland describes the opportunities from the innovative use of data

 

With “Permacrisis” chosen as 2022’s word of the year by Collins Dictionary, any idea that the current geo-political turmoil will somehow just disappear in 2023 seems unlikely. Instead, with economic concerns coming to the forefront, companies need to embrace innovation to help weather the uncertain landscape ahead.

 

Highlighting this, research from InterSystems has found that almost three-quarters (74%) of business leaders in the UK and Ireland view innovation as vital to their survival, driven by the desire to remain agile and futureproof their organisation.

 

Given today’s challenges, in the form of labour shortages and skills gaps, businesses may incorrectly feel that innovation is unachievable. In fact, overcoming these constraints is possible by empowering organisations and making decisions driven by data, decisions that will drive innovation. With data often locked away in silos and inaccessible to most, democratising data has a crucial role to play in allowing organisations to reach their innovation potential and stay ahead of their rivals.

 

The role data democratisation plays

In many enterprises, it is up to data scientists or IT teams to provision access to data and insights. This creates a bottleneck, resulting in requests for reports and fresh insights to go unanswered while available staff work on priority items, leading to decisions being either delayed, or made on inaccurate and out of date information.

 

Data democratisation overcomes these issues through empowering all business users with access to data, so that they can make data-driven decision, driving innovation across the enterprise and ensuring it forges ahead. To enable this, firms are increasingly implementing a smart data fabric architecture.

 

The smart data fabric, a next-generation data architecture, gives access to and orchestrates data from systems and silos both within and external to the organisation. Current and real-time information is provisioned on-demand, allowing users to get a complete and transparent view of the organisation and its customers.

 

Embedded within the fabric are dynamic self-service data exploration capabilities, allowing users to interrogate the data, research tangential questions, and drill down to greater resolution when required. The smart data fabric means that reliance on the IT team is reduced, putting the capability directly into the hands of those who need it.

 

Delivering value to the business

When IT teams and data scientists spend long hours sourcing ad-hoc data and insights for various business units, they are side-tracked from other critical aspects of their jobs, such as furthering the organisation’s digital transformation strategy and increasing innovation as a result.

 

Allied to the fact that business users get a real-time view of the enterprise, embedded analytics capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can assist businesses in automating mundane but important tasks within an organisation, which can help to mitigate skills gaps. With pressure mounting on budgets and the economic outlook continuing to look difficult, the use of AI and ML technology running on a smart data fabric architecture can allow companies to do much more with without adding to their headcount.

 

Tangible innovation results

It is natural for businesses to look to the future with caution at this time, given the velocity of change in the economic landscape, but off-ramping from innovation initiatives may lead to unwanted consequences. A more beneficial approach lies in unlocking data, turning it from a burden to an actionable asset that allows businesses to both understand their opportunities and, crucially, how to capitalise on them.

 

By harnessing data, organisations can better understand where cost and efficiency savings can be made and undertake the innovation initiatives needed to make those changes a reality. Likewise, with a 360-degree view of customer and business data, employees can better understand the pain points their customers are having and how best to solve them, and consequently, launch additional revenue-generating services.

 

It is when organisations empower their employees, arming them with on-demand access to timely data and delivering automation solutions to take care of repetitive tasks, that tangible results are delivered. In these turbulent times, innovation is needed more than ever, for organisations to not just survive but thrive in today’s unpredictable climate.

 


 

Chris Norton, Managing Director, InterSystems UK & Ireland

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com

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