How many of your business decisions are driven by data?
A
survey by the Business Application Research Center found that 58% of respondents claimed to use their gut and experience instead of data and facts. But can gut feeling be a solid basis for decision-making?
Data is the raw material that powers successful businesses. Data-driven organisations are investing in big data and data analytics to get the visibility they need to make smart decisions based on data and facts instead of opinion and guesswork. From doctors using data to accurately diagnose diseases to credit card companies using big data to prevent fraudulent transactions, data is rapidly transforming what’s possible across many different industries.
According to
PWC, "companies that are using data and analytics successfully are quick to spot opportunities, quick to assess ideas and quick to test and learn from these experiences. They innovate continuously. They understand and embrace new business models. They use data and analytics as a core enabling capability." Using data to feed business strategy leads to better decision making and can help you gain a competitive advantage.
Data is not worth much if you can’t analyse it to make sense of it. Businesses that can clearly see and structure their data are best placed to spot opportunities and generate insights that feed data-driven decisions. For example, clear visibility of data can power business intelligence that highlights specific areas where you have room for improvement. Data-driven decision-making flows from the ability to collect raw information and then transform it into accurate and actionable insights.
Developing a data-driven culture is an important step, but, before this can happen, you need to make sure that you can see your data with clarity and fully trust what you get. After all, you can’t implement a successful data-driven strategy if it is based on misleading or inaccurate data.
Clarity and trust are key
You need to absolutely trust your data before you can rely on it to influence the decision-making process. There can be no ambiguity or doubt about the quality of data when data analysis is powering long-term business strategy.
Making decisions based on dodgy data can cause a lot of damage to a business. Strategic decisions can only be made if the data sources they are based on provide a full and reliable picture. Using the right technology to see your data clearly will help you trust it. Can you imagine the mess that forecasts based on inaccurate data could cause for retail supply chains? Get the data wrong and retailers could end up sitting on more stock than they can handle.
In addition to the data sources themselves needing to be accurate, the data also needs to be structured and categorised in a way that can release the full power of data analytics.
It’s not about just any old data, it’s about the right data
In addition to providing clear vision to assist data-driven decision making, the right technology helps data-driven organisations avoid wasting too much time processing and preparing data. This is an important consideration because, with the wrong infrastructure, there is a risk that data teams spend more time finding and organising data than performing analysis. Hiring a highly qualified data team only to tie them all up in data collection would be an expensive mistake.
Data-driven strategies are fuelled by the right data, not necessarily everything that’s available. The business goals and strategy will help to define what data you want to collect. This will help you prevent your employees from working in silos and collecting data that nobody actually needs to use.
However, if you do find yourself sitting on a lot of raw data, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) make it possible to crunch numbers on a huge scale. This technology helps businesses make sense of vast amounts of data. With the efficiency of algorithms always improving, AI and ML have the potential to transform most industries in the years ahead. More data-driven businesses will emerge as AI, ML, and big data become more widely accessible and easier to apply across a broader range of industries.
Develop a data-driven culture, then use it to your advantage
Data-driven decisions help businesses move away from a culture of intuition to focus on accuracy and precision. It’s far easier to influence stakeholders when you can back your opinions up with data and facts. Seeing your business with clarity is a powerful foundation for future success.
Konica Minolta can give you an edge over your competitors by helping you draw valuable insights from data. Our heritage is in imaging and we have refined our imaging technology over several generations. We use this heritage, combined with our current knowledge and technologies in IoT and AI, to help our clients see their data with clarity and make data-driven decisions.
For example, Konica Minolta has developed non-destructive inspection technology for bridges called SenrigaN. It uses a combination of magnetic field sensors and artificial intelligence to make any hidden breakages or corrosion easy to see. This helps the discovery of potentially fatal vulnerabilities that can then be fixed before they lead to bridges collapsing.
Data can be applied across many different industries to help people make smart, data-driven decisions. These decisions can completely transform strategies, fine-tune business operations, and optimise workflows to reach the highest level of performance. Get the visibility you need to unleash the full power of your business data.