Data Driven Insight Monetization
“I’ve been recently hired to make our organization a data driven organization”, said one of the CMO’s at a recent conversation.
“I need business to drive insights to make active decisions leading to millions of $$ in revenue”, said one of the Sr. VP’s at another organization.
What does all this really mean for organizations? Why the focus on being a data driven organization and what has Insight Monetization got to do with it?
In the past, most decisions were made looking at small silos of data and analyzing them manually. IT, in many ways, was just a facilitator to the business (which of course is not true). In today’s dynamic world there are a lot of internal as well as external factors like Events, Social Media, Search Trends (either on Google or Yahoo or otherwise), Weather, School Holidays etc., which have a direct impact on business, however these impacts are being neglected, at large.
Reasons? There are many factors but the key ones gathered from Chief Analytics Officers and Chief Data Officers are summarized below:
Data is not available readily
Lack of hypothesis that external data can have such impact
Lack of resources
Net Impact: Lost opportunities to increase share of wallet or share of market impacting profitability, productivity and relevancy.
Where do the $$ insights come out of?
Connecting the dots and seeing the complete picture is a start. For that only internal silo data analysis is not effective. It requires a fusion of all internal data sources as well as external data sources where factors impacting the business outcome may be hidden. Of course this adds huge dimensionality to the data and makes it difficult to analyze manually. It’s not impossible but that means you needs dozens of data scientists crunching all that information which adds to resource costs as well as time to insights.
Machine automation helps identify the patterns and signals quickly and then human experts can filter those signals and act on them – making them more efficient and giving them time on their hands to do more.
(Tip: Machine learning by definition is a process which means if you are expecting magic to happen, reconsider your investment. Crunching data and validating the same is a time consuming process whereby the machine automation helps facilitate that at a much faster rate. Don’t think of this as a means to an end but a means to accelerate insight discovery and action).
So what does Insight Monetization really mean?
When the power of reporting / discovery is combined with applied analytics / predictive models – the unknowns present themselves - some relevant and some irrelevant. Presenting these unknowns by itself is of no use. Taking action on them is the critical factor. Actionable Insights are what drive businesses to the next level to overachieve, outperform their peers and competitors and be innovative.
These actions ultimately lead to decisions and these decisions drive profitability for the organization either by reducing costs or increasing revenues. Hence the term - Insight Monetization, driven or backed by Data.
In the posts to follow I’ll try and talk about specific examples (without naming any organizations) on how some of the companies are disrupting the markets on what we call today a Data Driven World.
Food for thought – Are you really leveraging data in the right way to succeed or will you be one of those who will lose a battle that could have been won otherwise?
