Is Digital Transformation the path for your company?

It hard not to look at the predictive analytics used by Uber to manage a fleet of drivers without owning one vehicle, or marvel at Netflix’s use of viewer data to power their own production house without a bit of envy. By now, most companies recognize that they have opportunities to use data and analytics to raise productivity, improve decision making, and gain competitive advantage. In a 2015 report, Bain & Company showed stark advantages gained by companies who have successfully embraced data analytics. These include outperforming their competitors, being 3x more likely to execute decisions as intended, and 5x more likely to make decisions faster, and these statistics are greater when part of an organization-wide digital transformation.

So why doesn’t every organization embrace data analytics as their holy grail….today, now? For many, Big Data is a daunting prospect. Where does the information I need come from? How do I translate massive and dynamic data sets into useful insights my company can act on? I’ve found the key to successfully leveraging big data in order to support digital transformation strategy is to start slowly and methodically. It is important to note that digital transformation is not simply to put your company on par with your competitors and deliver the same thing, but to differentiate yourself. Success here is about your company exposing new and unique business opportunities and opportunities for growth.

Gartner saw organizations facing challenges and predicted that by 2017, 60% data analytics projects will fail to move past the exploratory stage[1]. The reasons though are painfully obvious – we don’t know what we don’t know. Many companies have faced the problems of having mountains of data siloed across the organization, stuck in data warehouses or simply isolated in individual business units, and not being able to access and consolidate it.