Thriving on Data
It is no wonder organizations aspire to thrive on data, to be data-powered enterprises. With every business now being a de facto Technology Business, data is at its core. Dare we say, every Business is a Data Business?
Data powers superior customer experiences, highly tuned operations, creative machines, and smart, self-optimizing products and services. Data provides resilience, predictability, and effectiveness, but also enables organizations to achieve their sustainability and societal good ambitions. Data powers creative machines to help increasingly scarce human resources to co-create the best, most satisfying results with high efficiency.
It is certainly advantageous to be a data-powered enterprise. In our Data-powered Enterprise report and follow-up research, we conclude that the trailblazers, the “data masters”, see a 70% higher revenue per employee, a 245% higher fixed asset turnover, and 22% more profitability. Even more importantly, they achieve a 20% decrease in customer churn, and a 19% increase in customer satisfaction. They also enjoy a 19% employee productivity enhancement, and 16% more operational efficiency.
All the more reason for a continuous state of data-induced euphoria. If only it wasn’t so difficult to achieve data mastery. Yes, many organizations create data foundations: managing data sources, implementing technology, setting up governance, and assuring data quality. But activating data at the heart of the business strategy, having people in the operations embrace, trust, and use data for all their business and purposes, is a different ball game.
Data mastery puts this data activation at the heart of all trends:
Sharing and collaborating on data in all sorts of different internal and external ecosystems is one way to turn data from an asset into a first-class product. This approach gets more value out of data, but also drives achievements in key sustainability and societal goals.
Increasingly powerful self-service tools bring data where it should be – close to the business – on an enterprise scale. This trend is not only instrumental to creating a data-powered culture, but it also effectively addresses the increasing scarcity of skilled data specialists.
Self-service goes together with the move towards federated management of data across the organization, bringing ownership and control of data to the domain where it belongs, held together through company-wide open standards and rock-solid, automated platform services.
All businesses need clarity on their CO2 emissions and the impact of their sustainability actions. As our recent Data for Net-Zero research shows, data is key to delivering on net-zero ambitions.
This trend exemplifies the need for organizations to become a data master, getting essential data foundations and behaviors in place. But data itself needs to be sustainable too, as data-related activities themselves may lead to excess energy consumption and CO2 emission, adding to a growing heap of E-waste and data waste. ‘Big data?’ Maybe not such a huge thing anymore.
Then, as the pièce de résistance, AI systems rapidly increase their ability to create and generate text, video, audio, art, test data, and program code. What was state-of-the-art only a few weeks ago is already overtaken by the next AI even before you know it. And this pace of innovation is not expected to slow down soon. These systems facilitate humans in their most creative tasks and endeavors by proposing and co-creating content while speeding up processes by taking over up to 80% of the work, leaving only the performing of a final check and adding dazzling shine to the process! And these efficiency-boosting generative machines rapidly become even more relevant, as we face a growing scarcity of skilled people in most business activities.
Robert Engels
Expert in Residence