Innovative business ideas or new business models and process optimisations, enormous growth prospects – these can all be results of successful data science. And yet many companies remain blind to the value of data. Read here why such companies should urgently rethink their strategies.
Image Credits: Brooke Cagle / Unsplash
According to Marco Brambilla, Professor of Data Engineering and lead of the data science Lab at Politecnico di Milano, and lecturer at the EIT Digital Professional School course Data Science for Business Innovation, the amount of data available is not going to stop.
“Actually, just the opposite: Data collection practices get more and more widespread and cover all aspects of life around us. We are going to see more refined data descriptions for each person, object, and business. Our life will be described by the data we produce. That opens possibilities.”
Business innovations, faster responses to change, new business opportunities, and data-driven optimization processes; the list of benefits from data science is long. “We already started to see automatic notification of changes in services. For instance, at the travel level, you get automatically redirected if disruptions happen”, says Brambilla.
In some cases, people who notice disturbances may even notify systems so that their action becomes another source of information that feeds into data science flow processing.
This, in turn, helps companies to further exploit data integration and availability, and significantly reduce the cost of cross-selling, cross-marketing or cross-platform devices, for example, explains Brambilla: “Companies start getting information on what other people do and where they go and can use these for improving the customer experience over a broader level.”
The result? On the one hand, it creates new and innovative business opportunities based on increased interactions with users. On the other hand, even more data is put into circulation, waiting to be utilised and interpreted.
But according to Brambilla, especially small companies are struggling to keep abreast with extracting the value of their data. They have difficulties to keep up with developments in data science. “To run relevant analysis and approaches on data, it is essential that you need some amount of data. Sometimes small entities do not have this amount of data. The other problem is the initial investment. There is an initial investment to put these approaches in place. Small entities may not have the means to do that.”
“It is the modern evolution of the digital divide”, the professor of data science points out. “This divide is critical, even at a societal and economic level.” In the future, he says, it will be about “who has the data and who doesn’t, who can access the data and who can’t, and who can process the data and who can’t.”
Accordingly, all businesses – and especially small ones – need to be prepared for the change. He suggests that small businesses should try out existing platforms applied to their limited data set to see what they can get. Another option would be to create a network of small businesses to share information, form an alliance between small and large businesses or work more closely together in a value chain.
“Staying ignorant of the impact of data science on your business is not an option”, Brambilla stresses. Reading those warnings from the professor – are you interested in learning what data your organisation actually owns and keen to learn more about the skills it takes to extract value from data? This is what Brambilla addresses in his EIT Digital course “Data Science for Business Innovation” which is restarting at the end of September.
Register today for four half-days of classes that will take place online and will be rewarded with a joint EIT Digital / Politecnico di Milano digital certificate of completion. With the Silicon Luxembourg discount code “Sillux_20” you will save 20%.
We also got your colleagues and/or friends covered:
- Bring one person, get 40% discount,
- Bring two, get 50% discount,
- Bring in 10 participants and get the course for free.
