About Data Science

With an ever-increasing volume of data and information underlying most operations, Data Science has become an evolving and rapidly maturing aspect of each organization's day-to-day work. For those organizations early in their journey, there are a few important areas of consideration for where to invest your efforts.

Complete your transition to the Cloud

More than ever, managing your information in a distributed way is important. Not only can it help you realize efficiencies in processing, but it can also allow you to scale up your volumes of data, distribute your support needs and improve overall performance of your software and data driven efforts.

Most leaders today understand the importance of financial analytics and have invested their time and effort to monitor and disect their financial performance.

Oftentimes, however, financial analytics can be simple repetition of outcomes, and masque the actual drivers of performance, while failing to provide a sense of the road ahead. 

Why Financial Analytics is Failing Your Business

According to Gartner, the misuse of financial analytics can cost companies almost 1% of revenue per decision.

This misuse frequently comes down to a lack of clarity in the business problem, and and ineffective use of data and insights in a way more commonly applied to operations, marketing or sales. But, there are changes you can make to your approach to financial analytics that will help drive outcomes and insights.

You have spent a great deal of money on financial analytics, so your whole company benefits from insightful financial forecasts and insights. However, not every department can view the impact their part of the business is having on the whole. Here are some possible reasons why this is happening and a solution to help you solve this problem.

Why Financial Analytics is Failing You

With the advent of Industry 4.0, many companies are applying analytics to enable leaders throughout the organization see and understand the impact their area has on the financial health of the larger business and uncover strategies to advance their performance.

However, many firms that employ financial analytics are reporting immense challenges with executing their significant data initiatives. Here are some common challenges CEOs like yourself are facing.

Keeping track of your business financials is vital to the success of your company. Unfortunately, the traditional way of looking at your financial reports will only give limited insight into risk exposure or which customer segments will pull in more significant margins, for example. More and more CEOs are adding data scientists to their existing financial teams to dive deep into the health of their business.

As the CEO of your organization, you understand the vital role analytics plays in gaining a competitive edge. You built an analytics team and invested a significant amount of time and resources building a data-driven culture.

While you understand that an analytics strategy is never a 'one-and-done' task, it is not unreasonable that you were anticipating results more quickly than you are. If you find that your data team is unable to transform your analytics and ML/AI programs into actionable insights and scalable projects on the time table you anticipated, you are not alone. McKinsey & Associates has reported that data-driven companies are slow across the board realizing the real value advanced-analytics initiatives offers. But this doesn't suggest stopping your data efforts, however. Rather, it's a necessary first step towards unlocking inefficiencies and discovering new processes that will transform your business.

With that said, there are trouble spots you can act on to improve the results of your analytics programs now.

In today’s market, customer expectations are high, and competition breathes heavy down your neck. Meeting customer expectations isn't enough. Rather, to gain a competitive edge, you have to anticipate what customers want - even before they know. The key to doing so rests with harnessing the potential of analytics.

As a CEO, you feel the pressure to enhance innovation and create a competitive advantage. Step one is to ensure that you are meeting current expectations, and step two is to use data analytics to help you predict future demand.

As a CEO, you understand the innovation that data and analytics can unleash within your company. You know of course that companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook leverage their information to beat the competition – but more importantly, there are a multitude of smaller to mid-size companies also using Big Data to create opportunities to stay ahead of the competition.

However, you have a problem. Your leadership is not getting the information and insights they need to help them stay aggressively positioned. Without insights on operations and customers, your company can not begin to utilize the power of data and could fall behind competitors in your industry.

To solve this problem, it is important to first understand the causes of your information bottleneck. After you understand the cause, then you can begin to get your leaders the information and insights they need.

Many CEOs find it difficult to initiate or sustain a culture of innovation within their organizations. Yet whether you're competing with companies like IBM, Google, and Microsoft or much smaller start-ups, to remain competitive, organizations of all sizes must maintain innovation as a way of life.

If you're struggling, consider the following five things to maintain creativity and innovation at the heart of your business' operations.