Denouncing The Comfort Zone- Competitive Differentiation, Not Competitive Parity- Role of Data Science
As time passes by more and more businesses, and hence organizations : profit/non profit, government/private etc., are getting to realize that days are no more the same. Honeymoon period has come to an end - sticking on to standard ways to impress around, would no longer work. The transformed and reviewed taste buds of the current world, demand specialization with uniqueness - differentiation. Hence, the couch potatoes have to shed the couch, denounce the comfort zone along with the notion of survival, and invoke passion for delivering a Competitive Differentiation, towards achieving excellence - the notion of survival would either make one lazy when assured of it, or put into panic mode/anxiety when uncertain, passion is the only driving force for excellence. Data Science, approximately over last two decades, has evolved to be a champion with a through ground work, and it is ingrained with multiple disciplines and their associated techniques/technologies, with business being the key driving force.
The traditional data environment largely incorporates Data Ware House. This would be coupled with standard software packages like: Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP), Sales Force Automation, etc. The mindset is to just set up the conventional environments as per the norm, and assume that things would just keep rolling. The analytical capability relies heavily on business intelligence (BI) that is descriptive and retrospective in nature - one could say, living largely in the past. BI serves the monitoring capabilities and can help in developing a good report card of the organizational health. Nevertheless, when all would cling on to the same standard approaches how could a truly impressive differentiation be achieved. This is what one could say sticking on to competitive parity.
Competitive Parity : This could be described as attaining the competence as that of the competitors - for e.g similar operational capabilities. The organization just restricts its growth to the best competitor in the best case and coming back to the survival , just maintaining the average capability of the competitors would suffice - assuming one could just relax and develop a couch for the rest of life.
All that forecasting, planning and prediction would be limited to the human capabilities - experience of the concerned top business executives and what they would derive from the aggregated data/ scores provided by BI. The true potential remains buried in the vast unexplored data - semi structured and unstructured, external and internal to the organization. This is when Data Science comes into picture as an enabler to ultimately metamorphose the business to establish its Competitive Differentiation in the market. This simplistically can be thought of as transforming from selling the businesses product to selling the business as a service. In a way Data Science enables Competitive Differentiation if leveraged effectively with the focus on appropriate key business initiatives.
Competitive Differentiation is established when the organization has some thing unique to offer consistently and efficiently.
For the organization to establish its Competitive Differentiation certainly data is key.What has made Data Science so feasible, lucrative and popular is the underpinning of cheap data economics. The economics of Big Data is 20 to 50 times cheaper to store mange and analyze data. How does the organization go about leveraging this. With all the data available and the potential of Data Science to analyze the data to derive insights, put forth predictions provide recommendations, it is the identification of right business initiatives and the focus of analysis towards them that matters the most. Finally with right processes to envision best possible opportunities by leveraging the predictions, insights and recommendations a potential sustainable Business Differentiation can be achieved.