About Data Science

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.

As the volume and sources of data has grown, so have the possible applications of analytics and data science. And with the advent of techniques such as machine learning and other AI-based solutions, the demand for access to data will continue to accelerate.

Leading organizations are responding to this acceleration by treating their data as an asset that can help them improve operational performance and identify opportunities for new revenue generation.

However, while certain industry sectors have quickly adopted analytics and data science — namely professional services, finance and insurance — there continues to be room for growth in the use of data in other industries, as well as an untapped usage of the data and analytics talent needed to support analytical efforts.

The amount of information and analytics organizations have access to today compared to years ago has increased exponentially. This deluge of data and information has created challenges and opportunities for CEOs who are accountable for the potential and actual achievements of analytics.

We aren't meeting current production/ service expectations. How do we change that?

When you became the CEO of your company, you understood the demands to manage effective functions and logistics of the organization. You also understood that building relationships with suppliers, shipping services, and warehouses were key to success. However, when you discover that your company is not meeting its production and service expectations, you realize that relationship building is not enough. If you do not have the appropriate tools in place to accommodate the desires of your customers, then your business relationships will crumble.

Enterprises of all sizes should be using data to drive their business decisions. Yet, many businesses are lagging behind the business intelligence made available by data analytics. This is largely due to one massive misconception: Analytics is too complicated.

Fortunately, analytics can be simplified. It all depends on using the right tools and finding and hiring the right talent.