Jason Tan Managing Director DDA Labs

Advanced Analytics – How to Do Data Better

Today's business environment hinges on data. This data provides the foundation for decision-making and is the driving force for evolution and development. However, this is only true if data is utilised in the right way — if it is not made accessible to the teams, applications and operations that need it, severe problems can begin to emerge. All too often, we are seeing businesses fall into the trap of paying lip service to data and analytics but failing to leverage their true advantages.

So, how can these businesses 'do data better'? What can today's organisations do to eliminate data bottlenecks, siloing, and other points of disconnection that can be so catastrophic to operations? Embedding may hold the key — placing the analytics and the data at the heart of the processes that rely so heavily upon them. With this simplified data ecosystem, businesses drive revenue while elevating the customer experience.

The Insight Disconnect

Before we examine the benefits of direct analytics embedding, let's take a look at what's going on here. For forward-focused businesses, it's not simply a case of identifying insight, but of actively wielding that insight within the business operations environment. This becomes very difficult if there is a disconnect between analytics and operational teams. 

This disconnect can be caused by several factors:

- There may be conflicting priorities between analytics teams and enterprise IT teams.

- Analytics and data are viewed as supportive to operations, not direct operational drivers.

- The impact of analytics and data on business is not broadly understood, and so the insight is sidelined.

- The structure of the business has become too complex, resulting in communication and data-delivery breakdowns between departments.

When disconnection occurs, it represents a significant inefficiency that will either delay the delivery of insight or prevent this delivery altogether. As a result, all of the time, effort and investment expended on data analysis is effectively wasted, and the process becomes a cost drain rather than a revenue driver.

Harnessing the Benefits of Direct Advanced Analytics Embedding

By embedding advanced analytics directly into business operations, we are essentially creating a more direct route for data and insight — an information highway that bypasses this insight disconnect. In a sense, it's not so much about shortening the chain as it is about removing the chain altogether. When we place analytics and data insight within the operational ecosystem itself, the disconnection discussed above ceases to exist.

“Advanced analytics is essentially an arm of AI and machine learning (ML) — the process of embedding basically means you are adding intelligent components to business operations, enabling autonomous or semiautonomous decision-making “

This leads to a number of key operational advantages:

The Organisation Becomes Truly Data-Driven

'Data-driven' has become something of a buzzphrase, referring to any decision or process based on information or insight. But becoming truly data-driven is a little different, and certainly more profound. To be truly data-driven, businesses need to leverage analytics within the operational environment itself, enabling rapid responses and enhanced agility at the operational level. This is not possible unless analytics is embedded right where it is required, rather than relayed in from somewhere else.

Businesses Can 'Do Data Better'

Doing data better means improving on what went before. Traditional business intelligence and data analytics teams can certainly provide a benefit for businesses, but, as mentioned above, there is often a disconnect — an inefficiency that derails genuine insight and value. By elevating analytics from the data lake and data warehouse levels and embedding it into the operational level, businesses are revolutionising the way they conceive and process data on an organisation-wide basis.

The Way Is Clear for Business Transformation

Digital transformation is a complete overhaul of operational capabilities and processes and a welcome modernisation for businesses. However, there may be barriers. Physicist Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, 'we can't solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them', and the same is true for analytics — businesses cannot solve data siloing and disconnection issues with the same thinking that caused these issues in the first place. By embedding advanced analytics directly into operations, the data framework is revolutionised, creating a reliable foundation for digital transformation.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Become Key to Decision-Making

Advanced analytics is essentially an arm of AI and machine learning (ML) — the process of embedding basically means you are adding intelligent components to business operations, enabling autonomous or semi-autonomous decision-making. Moves towards AI and ML depend upon the free flow of data, and so advanced analytics is key to the adoption of these tech concepts. By removing barriers and obstacles, you're not only making operations more streamlined and straightforward; you're making them more powerful and capable too.

The Next Phase for Analytics: Advanced Analytics as Component

What we are looking at here is a reimagining of what analytics actually is. Rather than being a stream of insight that needs to be managed and directed to a specific area of business, it has become a component of that area or of a certain process or protocol. API technology gives us the capability to turn data and analytics into building blocks that we can then use to fashion applications and software structures — we no longer need to plug these solutions into a data source, because the analytic component is an inherent part of the solution itself.

The chain removed, the disconnect is eliminated — this is the next phase in the development of analytics: analytics as an inherent component at the heart of business operations.