Digital Transformation: How to Create an Intelligent Company
Companies are besieged by information and bedazzled by IT solutions. With the rapid advancements in information technology, high-speed Internet, mobile technology and artificial intelligence, we now have access to huge amounts of data about customers, their demographics, and their online behavior across all touch points.
The advantage of access to so much information is not just increased revenue and long-lasting customer relationships, but also the ability to develop sensitivity to warning signals, which allow companies to prevent or mitigate disasters. The avoidance of conflict, the management of cyclical downturns or strategic missteps, and the management of the company’s future are at the core of creating intelligent businesses.
Companies have improved their practices with respect to capturing greater amounts of data. However, most organizations pass on these data to decision-makers in bulk, leaving them to sift through it and identify relevant segments on which to base strategic and operational decisions.
Although they may have gotten good at collecting data, most companies have yet to develop the ability to generate actionable insights which they can quickly share with decision makers and clients.
Organizations need to focus on retrieving knowledge that is actionable and to use effective processes and tools to share and take actions effectively. In other words, there needs to be an increased focus and on the analytics strengths and tooling of the modern company.
The concept of the intelligent company has evolved as a reaction to these new requirements. Massive amounts of data and rapidly evolving technologies conflict with our inability to adapt to the speed of change. An intelligent company is a company that ensures that the data it collects is quickly and continuously translated into actionable knowledge, and makes the relevant technologies part of its business model.
For a company to shift towards becoming intelligent, it needs to have more than just the technology to enable the transformation. There is a need for significant changes in the way employees think about data and how it can be effectively processed and acted on, i.e. a change in culture and the way employees go about their daily business. In particular, data scientist Ronald van Loon has identified the following areas as key to creating intelligent processes that augment the abilities and efficiency of employees:
Design thinking is part of a broad methodology that amalgamates elements of imagination, intuition, holistic reasoning, and logic, to explore all the probable solutions for a given problem. It includes the identification of all unarticulated needs expressed by a consumer. After identifying the needs, the team creates solutions that address all those needs and end up creating the “wow” effect. The solutions are generated creatively and analytically. Design thing should always be more solution-oriented than problem-oriented.
Data is frequently used by organizations to find and extract information that can be used to assist or help in setting strategic goals. The efficiency and utility of these strategic goals go on to define the future of the organization and how it fares against the competition.
Once you understand the importance of data, it is easy to quantify the negative impact of low-quality information and badly structured data. In fact, bad data is estimated to coast global businesses in excess of 10 trillion dollars a year.
The data you are using should be flawless and should work in tandem with any artificial intelligence system deployed in the organization. Both AI and good data work hand in hand to assure the success of process analytics, especially predictive analytics. Business risk analysis, in particular, should always be based on meticulously curated and optimized data.
