Unlock the value of data with intuitive, low-cost analytics
In the digital age, disruptive companies are using technology to transform industry after industry. The world’s largest accommodation provider owns no property. The world’s most valuable retailer holds no stock. And the world’s largest taxi firm owns no cars. What these companies have in common is the ability to analyse vast quantities of data to power fast, highly informed decisions that help them outpace their rivals.
Whether you want to bring the right new products and services to market faster, boost loyalty through a better understanding of customer preferences, or plot your expansion into new markets, the critical information is potentially waiting to be mined from your stores of operational, sales, customer and financial data.
To succeed in the new economy, you need to get all of this data working harder—but much of it is locked away in organisational and technological silos. As the appetite for analytics grows, IT departments are increasingly burdened with requests to source and extract data. When the right data has been found, it must then be transformed, cleaned and joined before it can be used in analytical tools. These stages are usually the responsibility of data scientists, who then have little time left actually to do any analysis. And each time business users want to ask the same questions on updated data, much of the sourcing and preparation process must be re-run.
As well as being costly and inefficient, this cycle of requesting and waiting for data shrinks the window of opportunity for the business to identify and act on new opportunities. So how can IT support faster, proactive decision-making that cuts time-to-value and enable a collaborative analysis of big data without big upfront costs?
By choosing an approach that marries your on-premises data with cloud-based analytics services, you can start small, deliver fast, prove the value, and extend your new capabilities in whatever direction offers the best results.
The beauty of a hybrid-cloud approach to analytics is that you can start anywhere, achieve demonstrable business value, and fill in the gaps later to build out a full, coherent platform for intelligence analytics, machine learning and AI. Each success delivers ROI, creates new opportunities and feeds back into the development of new capabilities in a virtuous circle.
And because this approach requires no investment in on-premises hardware or software, it lowers the barriers to entry and enables businesses to experiment with analytics at low risk. For the IT department, this keeps costs and complexity low and enables resources to be focused on helping business users identify and work with the right data for their needs.
To find out how Northdoor can help your business get up to speed with analytics, click here.