Leveraging and applying new technological breakthroughs to one’s business seems like a no brainer, especially in sectors where competition is fierce. Being different from one another, every company tries to find its own pathway – but on what factual basis can we drive a digital transformation? What if you could use the data your company produces to reinvent your business? The potential ways to use data is infinite and could give companies the feeling they are lost. To help you find your path, here are several advices from the trenches that will make you understand the potential of your data for your business evolution and the main key points to tackle when you start a project.
(Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash)
We’ve now clearly entered the data era, where sensors measure close to everything in the world. These raw bits of information can be refined to help optimize the business processes and to find solutions to complex problems, but they are often underestimated in terms of value and let aside when not immediately useful for operations. The saved data can also be incomplete or unreliable, blurring the picture of what’s happening.
Gathering enough reliable data empowers you to understand the minute details of your business and outlines some of the pathways for the future development of your company, including new services. In our digital economy, every industry can now take advantage of data analytics, from the manufacturing industry to e- commerce and marketing. What happens if you don’t have enough data or aren’t saving data at all? The first step would be to evaluate your situation by defining your main objective: enhancing the yield of your production line? Improving the output quality? Selling new services for your online clients? Understanding what is influencing your sales?
“I usually advise to split a digital transformation project into sub-problematics, enabling outside-the-box thinking and research that keeps iterating until original solutions are found”
Working with clearly defined business goals, your data analytics partner should initially assess your data maturity, whether it is internal data or data from a 3 rd party. To get the best results the fastest, “I usually advise to split a digital transformation project into sub-problematics, enabling outside-the-box thinking and research that keeps iterating until original solutions are found”, says Jean-Philippe Hugo, CEO of Wizata.
Second step: with a data analytics expert, embrace the opportunity to make sense of all this information through Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate value and to guide your tailor-made digital transformation. AI isn’t science fiction anymore: algorithms and models now think, learn, and keep improving to generate unique solutions to businesses that humans alone wouldn’t be able to find. Rapidly releasing early iterations of solutions to sub-problems allows you to detect mistakes and to enhance the reliability of your algorithms, strengthening them before integrating them into a large-scale solution to your business problems. To validate your research, you can construct an AI model based on historical data from 2016, test its predictive power with data from 2017, and then deploy the custom solution to the current 2018 production.
“When the client is ready we can move from research to production with the flick of a switch”
The third advice we would give is to not be afraid to start! Data analytics is a big subject but it doesn’t require a big budget. Of course, you should dream big, but you can start with small projects. Thanks to the power and scalability of the cloud, even startups can take advantage of these new technological innovations for a small investment. “We’re making our experiments in a digital laboratory stored on the cloud”, notes Jean-Philippe Hugo. “When the client is ready we can move from research to production with the flick of a switch”.
A startup created this year will surely take advantage of the power of data. But even if your company wasn’t created with data in mind, the data era opens new fantastic opportunities to reinvent your business.
