Approximately 40% of business leaders plan to build businesses on the foundations of data, analytics and AI over the next five years, according to McKinsey. What’s interesting is that these rank the highest across all new business building categories. IDC has forecast that global spending on digital transformation initiatives is expected to reach $4 trillion by 2027, with generative AI playing a significant role in this rapid acceleration of growth.
Data and all its permutations, technologies and applications are changing the very essence of what it means to do business in the digital era. PwC emphasises how AI has made it easier to process unstructured data, resulting in increased use cases and lower costs. Barry Barkley, Head of Data at Mint Group, believes this is the perfect time for the South African organisation to shift its perspectives and benefit from the modern era of data accessibility.
“If you view data not as a byproduct but as a strategic asset, it changes the way you make business decisions in two fundamental ways,” he explains. “You make better decisions with more input (more data, more insights, more accurate information), rather than relying on hunches or perception. Secondly, you can unlock business value through analytics that are built around exactly what your business needs, and where it wants to go.”
Barkley emphasises that data on its own has no inherent value. This sits in the technology, systems and strategy you build around it to ensure it creates business impact. “If you’re not starting with understanding what that business value is going to be as your point of departure, then chances are you’re not going to achieve it,” he says.
Companies should start by establishing a data strategy and setting transformation goals, then invest in the necessary technology. The opposite approach results in a widespread challenge that companies now face in South Africa: data fragmentation. “Over the past two decades, there’s been a proliferation of bespoke, niche solutions to solve specific business problems. Companies have ended up with massive suites of disparate data and analytics systems that aren’t integrated.”
This fragmentation creates two obstacles. The first is that the company can only view problems through one lens, as it is only examining a limited set of data. The second is that different business units and departments own their data and can become possessive about sharing it, forcing everyone to operate in silos.
Barkley illustrates this with an example: “If you set your manufacturing plans in isolation, you’re not responding to what the market wants. However, if you enrich your manufacturing data with sales data, you can effectively adapt to market demands. Similarly, if sales have visibility of the manufacturing plan, they can better serve customers with accurate delivery information.”
To overcome these obstacles, Barkley recommends consolidating data into a unified platform. "The best way to break down silos is to bring data out of operational systems and into a data platform where you can provide visibility of data with governance and control. This visibility of trusted data assets enables teams to experiment with the data to uncover value."
Data governance and compliance should be a priority. Companies need metadata, such as classifications and data dictionaries, not only for AI to understand what it's analysing, but also for information workers to discover value-adding datasets easily. This represents a shift back to data approaches that have lost focus. In recent years, data governance has been viewed as a nice-to-have, with companies focused more on reporting outcomes.
As a South African business, the adoption of AI holds great potential value and has become very accessible to organisations. However, without trusted and governed datasets, AI might create more problems than it solves by potentially producing misleading insights to unsuspecting users.
By reimagining data as a strategic asset and implementing effective data management practices within a unified analytics and business intelligence platform, as offered by Microsoft’s industry-leading products, businesses can achieve the agility needed to compete effectively in today's fast-paced markets.
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