Top 4 ways data strategy drives business forward
How to leverage data to reduce costs, increase revenue, mitigate risk and improve experience
July 29, 2020 | By: Jennifer Kling
As the world reacts and evolves to our current market conditions—namely, massive disruption—organizations are forced to accelerate at an even greater pace. Implementing a winning data strategy has been realized as a business imperative to drive transformation through reduced costs, increased revenue, mitigated risk and improved experience. Having a strong data strategy aligns to each of these core areas because ultimately, it’s an enabler of them.
1. Reduce costs
Cost savings is always a top priority, but making those decisions needs to be based off of real-time, accurate data. Organizations need the right storage platforms, tools and technologies to consume their data in order to receive the right information at the right time to make those important decisions.
Many of our customers are looking to reduce costs by evaluating their expensive on-prem storage and considering replatforming to the cloud. But moving to the cloud isn’t a simple one-and-done project—you need to decide what the company’s priorities are and which tools to best utilize to achieve predictive and prescriptive data analytics. For example, you could look at AWS, which offers its own consumption services to digest data, or you could consider a more subscription-based scalable solution through Snowflake. The options are endless.
And it’s not just about reducing hardware costs—it’s also taking into account costs associated with the resources to maintain your systems and leveraging better products and processes aligned to your strategic goals.
2. Increase revenue
Once you have a solid analytics platform at the helm of your data strategy, you’ll discover greater access to your unstructured and structured data. That access is what enables you to make predictive and prescriptive decisions—the ultimate goal. Using data to make decisions and realize solutions before there’s a problem is how organizations are able to wield data as a competitive advantage—and from there, tie into increasing revenue. Having a clear view of your data can be used to fast-track more business opportunities, whether that’s identifying additional services to sell or new revenue lines to develop that will increase and expand business growth.
3. Mitigate risk
Proper use and analysis of data is critical in risk mitigation—whether it’s risk of losing a customer or protecting against vulnerabilities. In order to truly leverage big data in risk management, organizations must review their entire data strategy and practices to monitor, control and approach risk. A robust data strategy coupled with the data insights pulled from the right data management tools is needed to enhance business performance. The challenge is having restraint from executing a migration or purchasing a tool without having a long-term vision for success.
4. Improve experience
It’s clear that leveraging data analytics is necessary to understand customers in order to improve their customer experience. But a data strategy can do more than just help you engage customers—it can also improve your internal employee experience to make better, informed decisions for the business. For example, an internal employee in procurement using an analytics tool or dashboard to make strategic decisions would benefit from the right data analytics strategy to see things in a different light, and ultimately predict and prescribe accurately for the company.
Data analytics has the power to drive organizations through their evolving business strategy as they aim for these goals. Building a modern and comprehensive data strategy that acts as roadmap will help businesses make informed decisions around future-facing solutions that help save money, increase revenue opportunities, reduce risk or improve user experience.
As TEKsystems’ enterprise data and analytics leader, Jennifer Kling helps organizations maximize the impact data and insights have on business results, operational efficiency and effectiveness, as well as fact-based cultural change. With over 25 years of experience in IT and business roles, Jennifer provides a unique perspective on cost control, revenue generating, risk mitigation and customer experience.