Data has never been more important than it is today. People are always talking about how it is at the core of what makes a company valuable.
So when did a non-physical set of bits stored on a server become one of the most precious assets of a company?
The answer is in the data itself. Technology has evolved so strongly and rapidly in the last 16 years that what didn’t seem to be important back then, is now worth millions of dollars. In the old times data used to be stored in physical paper files, or even in heavily structured and slow computer storage. This did not make it easy to analyze the information and come to conclusions that were crucial to a business strategy.
A typical organization is constantly asking questions. “How do we grow? Should we get more clients? How can we expand our business with our current set of customers? What is our most important product or service? Are our customers happy? How can we improve? What is our brand impact and reach? What is or target in the market? What is our current growth compared to last year.. or the year before?”
The answer to all these questions and more is always in the data, the more you can correlate, the more you can analyze and the more you take advantage of these numbers, the more success you are going to have in your business, especially if you are an online company( e.g online retail).
Organizations need to make decisions on a daily basis. How can we know if those decisions are good or not? Without a scientific approach, people will take chances based on outdated information, or even on visceral feelings, which is not that bad if you are a business guru, but then what is the success ratio of those decisions?
It is clear that managing a business requires creativity and experience, but if every single decision is at least somehow guided by a set of data or even statistics, the risk reduction and probability of having a positive outcome improves greatly. And this is precisely why the biggest companies nowadays are dedicated to collecting and analyzing data (e.g Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). This is what is differentiates the big players from the regular ones.
Collecting information and rapidly analyzing it gives your organization the velocity to take action in a fast paced industry. This means shorter times to release and to production, taking advantage of an online opportunity with an emerging trend (e. g Periscope vs. Facebook live videos) and even allows you to fail faster, hence loosing less money on new ventures.
Doing research and investigating your options has never been this easy. The opportunity to use cloud services, and scale exactly at the same rate of your system usage, test ideas online, gather information on page views, clicks, and related interests, is all now possible with a fraction of the budget a company used to have to invest in 10 years ago.
The amount of data and improvement of the systems is so phenomenal that cognitive services, automation and AI algorithms have gotten really good. So good that we are already talking about reduction in certain labor forces being replaced by automated systems in the next 20/30 years.
And all this is built on top of the ever precious DATA!
Chances are that your organization already owns a good amount of data, the first question is … what are you doing with it? Are you taking full advantage of it? Maybe the solution to your company growth predicament is already right under your nose.
In today’s age it is safe to say there is no excuse. Take some time to take care of your data, analyze it and know that it can be one of your most important investment options, and in some cases an underrated one.
In any case, data is here to stay. There is a clear trend to grow your business around data, and this is not an easy task. Always look to have a strong team taking care of your information, and that’s precisely what we are here for. We understand this and that’s exactly why we love your data.
Find out how Pythian can help you optimize your data today.
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