Businesses investing in the establishment of a data culture (platforms, solutions, and employee training) stand to gain a 60% improvement on the return on their data assets, according to a recent research from market research company IDC.
Leon Wright, business group lead for the server and tools division at Microsoft SA, believes key insights are needed to fuel decisions that support business strategy and planning, help organisations cut operational costs, and assist in identifying consumer shopping trends and patterns.
"Investment in the right tools can potentially have big payoffs for organisations and can ultimately result in the business gaining valuable insights," says Wright. "Consider the impact of the US-based Red Robin restaurant chain's decision to test a new hamburger across the franchise. To achieve this, all of the chains provided frontline waiters with devices on which to input customer feedback - likes and dislikes - about the burger."
Normally, according to Wright, this kind of testing, feedback and response would take around 12 to 18 months. This time, however, Red Robin was able to get a new, improved burger onto the menu within only four weeks.
"An additional benefit also came out of the project in the form of improved staff retention and work satisfaction levels. Red Robin's employees were much happier since they felt they were making a difference to the company and its customers, and ultimately felt more like they were a part of the company."
Insights like these, he says, can be delivered by analytics tools that simplify the laborious task of staying on top of the latest business intelligence (BI). These tools and solutions enable users to easily explore and present data, and confidently make predictions or projections that are required for a future outlook and planning.
Wright observes that analytics used to be a sole bastion of data scientists, but modern analytics solutions have empowered every employee, since any one of them can be provided with easy access to the BI and interactive data visualisations solutions required to make more informed business decisions quicker.
"BI tools provide all employees with the information and insights they require to become more effective in their respective roles. For instance, these solutions can help a company's CFO and COO collaborate better when it comes to planning, forecasting and drawing up budgets, helping the company to cut costs, streamline operations and anticipate future demand to adjust supply as needed."
Analytics, he notes, has undergone many changes in the last few years and its use is no longer merely relegated to statisticians and data scientists.
"Business analytics can now be used by virtually every employee so that an organisation can maximise its insight gathering capabilities to deliver better BI that helps the firm remain focused on the future to perform better in the present," concludes Wright.
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