How Data & Analytics Can Recover Businesses After the Pandemic
As the world contends with the Covid-19 pandemic and its profound impact across regions and industries, companies are not only looking for ways to safeguard their people and customers but also their business’ long-term future – read howdata & analytics can help your business deal with the crisis.
The ability to make good, timely decisions will be critical to how well businesses survive this crisis. It will also impact how well they can position themselves on a trajectory of future profitable growth when things begin to return to a ‘new normal’.
Cloud-based data platforms and data & analytics have a large role to play in this—from stabilizing the business to laying the foundations of new processes and predicting what’s next. Therefore, it is critical that you have short, medium and long-term data-driven plans in place as quickly as possible to help make informed decisions.
Here are the three key data-driven pathways—resilience, realignment and recovery—to maximize your chances of emerging with prosperity from the Covid-19 crisis.
The power of data on the pathways to prosperity
Decision-making becomes more challenging during periods of stress, especially where there is uncertainty about the future. To remain successful, data must underlie every aspect of the business, providing critical input to readjust plans and predictions, as well as guide and automate decision-making.
Data has already played a significant role in the response to the crisis. Healthcare providers are leveraging data from countries that were affected earlier by the pandemic to forecast needs for hospital beds, masks and ventilators. Grocery retailers are utilizing point-of-sale (POS) data to help distributors identify and ship the items most important to their customers. And telcos are using network traffic data to monitor and manage network capacity, build predictive capacity models, identify bottlenecks, and prioritize and plan network expansion decisions.
It’s no wonder that 75% of business intelligence, data & analytics professionals are working harder and longer hours now than before the pandemic, according to Forrester.
Applying data & analytics to every phase of your crisis strategy
It’s positive that now more than ever, many organizations are striving to make data & analytics a centerpiece of their culture and way of doing business. Here are some top tips on how you can develop a data-driven response to a crisis.
During the immediate response, data & analytics professionals will need to revisit their resilience plans for their data platform to ensure it stands up in the current operating environment. Ensuring that performance doesn’t suffer is paramount, especially where workloads and data volumes have increased. And maintenance is essential to ensure data is robust—automating key tasks such as database tuning, automated indexes, data distribution and compression. The ability to rapidly onboard new data and provide access to real-time insights will also grow in importance. As will the ability to maintain the security and integrity of data during periods of remote working.
