How to Transform Your Business into an Analytics Company?

This thought leadership article is brought to you bySayOne Technologies– providing tailored data analytics applications for customers around the world.

Many organizations are affected by the rapid changes in our society due to new technologies. The rate of change that organizations experience has increased to such an extent that half of S&P 500 companies are expected to be replaced by newcomers in the next 10 years. These newcomers use emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D printing or the Internet of Things. In addition, most of the new organizations take a different form than traditional organizations; many new organizations, or startups, are decentralized platform organizations that have been around for less than a decade but have experienced exponential growth.

Examples of these newcomers are Uber, which is the world’s largest taxi company that does not own any taxis; AirBnB, the world’s largest accommodation provider that does not own any hotels; WhatsApp, the world’s largest telecom company that does not own any telecom infrastructure or Alibaba, the second largest retailer that does not own any inventory. Each of these innovators disrupts an entire industry and they have two common denominators; they collect data in everything they do and they use algorithms to derive actions from that data. This data-driven approach completely changes the rules of the game. In order to deal with these changes, organizations have to understand how they too can become data-driven.

For many organizations, transforming the organization into a data-driven, analytics company is difficult. Big Data changes how organizations are managed, how organizations are designed, the culture and identity of an organization and changes how decisions are made. In addition to that, not the data collection is the challenge for organizations, but applying and deriving action from the data, i.e. the analytics of the data at hand. More and more organizations understand this and as such Big Data has now emerged as the corporate standard.

Not only newcomers such as Uber or AirBnB can take a data-driven approach. Big Data offers every organization tools such as predictive or prescriptive analytics to derive insights from the massive amounts of data collected. These insights enable organizations to better deal with the rapid changes in the environment and to ensure sustained competitive advantage, even when newcomers try to disrupt your business. So, how can your organizations become data-driven?

For those organizations that have no experience with Big Data Analytics, it is important to understand that starting with Big Data does not have to be a painful and long process. In fact, thanks to new software tools such as Big-Data-as-a-Service, it has become relatively easy to get started. These solutions offer many advantages to organizations, including a pay-as-you-go price plan, which means that, especially at first, the costs can remain low. However, before you start with a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution, or any other Big Data project, ensure that you have a common understanding within the organizations what Big Data is and what analytics can do for your business.