Statista predicts that the volume of data created, copied, produced, and consumed globally will reach 147 zettabytes in 2024.
Dr Karen Luyt, expert solution architect: business and digital advisory, and Stefan Steffen, executive: data insights and intelligence, at BCX discuss the key themes and challenges facing organisations when it comes to data, analytics, and business intelligence.
While not all data is created equal, organisations with the right tools can leverage it as an asset to drive growth, innovate and differentiate. Data has to be, says Gartner, infused into the business – digital tea leaves soaking into the strategic foundations of the organisation – because this is the only way to improve decision-making, revenue and value.
However, while organisations are aware of the importance of data analytics, particularly as waves of artificial intelligence (AI) wash into corporate ecosystems, they are struggling to find balance. They have different levels of maturity, lack strong data foundations, and don’t have strong data governance principles in place.
This is further complicated by the fact that many are still trying to find insights and intelligence within outdated architectures that aren’t built to handle the scale and influx of data in modern business. Companies are seeking a modernised architecture capable of leveraging AI while delivering long- and short-term value.
Another challenge is that there are insufficient use cases demonstrating how data is delivering value to the organisation. Gartner has found that less than half of data and analytics teams are delivering value to the business at a time when they are under pressure to meet a growing array of responsibilities and expectations.
The focus on customer experiences and customer-centricity hasn’t delivered measurable improvements for South African consumers and businesses – the PwC South African Retail Sentiment Index 2023, for example, put Customer Service at -68.4% – despite many investing into a data-driven strategy.
This begs the question – are organisations actually being driven by their data? Are they actively making decisions and shaping strategies around their data and the insights it provides? There is a gap in terms of the quality of the data and what the business experiences from its analysis of the data.
Decision-makers require solutions that allow them to drive the business with their data. They want value, insights, seamless access, and relevance – all the benefits that are supposed to come with data but are often lost in interpretation due to limited infrastructure, visibility and technology.
This brings the conversation back to AI. It can be used to apply the right models and interpretations to the data, allowing the business to gain a crucial business advantage through improved customer understanding and the ability to generate services that increase revenue.
The data conversation today isn’t about the lakes and the access, it’s about extracting insights and creating models that focus on one core priority – business value.
An HR manager, for example, can leverage data to assess employee performance and engagement, find skilled talent to fill critical gaps within the organisation and improve hiring decision-making.
BCX has collaborated with numerous South African organisations to integrate analytics within HR departments to maximise visibility into employee behaviours, sick leave, skills development and fraud. These solutions use an intelligent architecture to determine if employees are abusing leave over time, undertake forensic examinations of fraud incidents, and identify anomalies in an individual’s behaviour.
It is a granular level of visibility provided from within the data that trickles down into resolving employee engagement challenges while minimising the risks of cybercrime from within. Across HR, finance, logistics, supply chain and every other silo and sector, data and analytics can help organisations become data-driven success stories, but only with the right data architecture, data management and platforms in place.