Why being a data-driven company isn’t enough
In the race to digitalize big data, business use cases are too often neglected. Here are ways to make big data and AI projects work for your business.
Companies might be better off in their artificial intelligence (AI) and big data business projects if the goal wasn’t so much on being data-driven but on being business-driven.
I’m thinking about a thought-provoking article in the Harvard Business Review from February 2019 by Randy Bean and Thomas H. Davenport titled Companies Are Failing in Their Efforts to Become Data-Driven. The authors say that companies are failing to become data-driven, though they are aggressively pursuing AI and big data. The article also said 77% of executives believe that business adoption of AI and big data is a major challenge. Even if companies are data driven, adoption can be daunting.
Here is a case in point: An IT department of a major financial company I am working with is digitalizing and indexing all of its documentation. The project manager told me the project’s goal is to get rid of all the paper and to digitalize it in a central, searchable repository of data that applications and systems across the company could link into.
From an IT standpoint, it is easy to see the logic; however, I am struck that no one at the company identified the business processes that could be optimized by this repository of data that was being digitalized, or thought about the analytics and business insights the company could derive from this data, which would become searchable.
In short, there is no strategic plan or business direction aside from digitalizing the data. The product is truly “data driven,” since it is producing data, but it isn’t business driven, and the company isn’t positioning itself to see any impactful business results for many months.
Many organizations are going through a similar struggle. An inherent challenge with many of these technologies is that you just can’t plug them in like a traditional transactional system and start cranking out invoices, inventory reports, and purchase orders.
