Why Datafication is Key for the Organisation of Tomorrow

Imagine, it is Friday afternoon, and after a long week at work, you and your colleagues decide to go to the bar to unwind and refresh with a nice cool glass of beer. You go to your favourite pub and upon reaching the bar order a few pints. However, instead of the bartender giving you your beloved beer, he hands you a plastic card and tells you that from now on, you can pour your own beer as much as you want and as often as you want.

Of course, if you wish, the bartender can still serve you, but with the new system you can try any beer that you wish and have as little or as much as you want. If you want to try out the new American Pal Ale but only want a small glass because you are not sure if you will like it? Go ahead. If you feel more like a pint of a Summer Ale, it’s all up to you. The new system automatically calculates the amount of beer you consume.

You pay your tab at the end of the evening, just like always. As the evening progresses, you and your colleagues try out varies new types of beers, which you would normally never order as you were limited to buying a half-pint glass or larger. In the end, your bill is higher than normal, but you had a great evening.

This might sound like a far-off scenario, but in reality, it is already possible. It shows exactly the enormous possibility of analytics. A few years ago, the Israeli company Weissbeerger developed a system that enables bar owners to equip their kegs of beer with sensors to datafy their beer-pouring activities. This system enables customers to tap their own beers and pay exactly what they consume. It also enables the bar owner to know exactly which beers are selling when, at what time of the day and to whom. This is valuable information for the bar owner, as it enables the bar owner to order more beer at the right time since they know exactly how much of which beer is consumed when. However, it also shows which bartenders are giving beers away for free, pour for their own consumption or how much of the draught beer pour is inaccurate.

For many breweries and bar owners, this information would be the holy grail of beer pouring. Especially, because breweries often spend vast amounts of money on marketing activities and market research but remain in the dark in terms of the ‘last mile’ of information. Research by the company Weissbeerger showed that bars that installed their system not only had more information about who consumed what and when, it also helped them to take simple corrective actions for the ‘generous bartender’. Those bars that installed the self-serve system saw their consumption rise by a whopping 30%.

Weissbeerger’s sensor technology and consumption analytics show the power of big data analytics. Providing relevant insights can contribute to improving your organisation and increasing your revenue. It shows that access to the data alone is not sufficient. Only if you are capable of doing something with the insights derived from the data, can you actually make a difference for your customers and shareholders. Nevertheless, it starts of course with data and only if you have access to data, you can analyse that for insights. Therefore, the organisation of tomorrow can only succeed if it has digitised and datafied every, or at least most of the ideas, processes and customer touchpoints.

It is important to note the difference between digitalisation and datafication. Digitalisation refers to the conversion of information into digital format. For example, converting music into MP3 files, photos into JPEG, text to HTML and analogue video to YouTube videos. Doing so will increase your available data exponentially.