Leveraging Data & Analytics

Sometime ago I was on a work visit to some Africa towns with some colleagues, on one of our trips we needed to pass through a busy  city to get to our destination.  I made some research before we commenced our journey  and found out there was a bye-pass, we could take and avoid passing through this rowdy city,  when I shared this with my colleagues, a member of the team who had been on this trip in previous years said the road I was suggesting stopped at a quarry site and will not lead us to our destination.  He asserted that our only option was going through the busy city.

After some deliberation I was able to convince the team to use the new route.  My friend who had been on the trip in  previous years was uncomfortable with the decision,  he said we may have to turn back after we would have spent about an hour on the road, but unknown to him some developmental work had opened up the new route.  So we followed the new route and got to our destination,  saving some hours and the troubles of the busy city.

Similar scenario plays out in our work places today. Advances in  technology have created new possibilities and better ways of doing things. But sometimes we stick to the old ways we are comfortable with  and we short change ourselves.

Experience is key and plays an important role in the work place,  but we need to merge this with new insights to get the best outcome in today’s fast changing digital world.

To excel in today’s digital world,  we need to be learners not just learned,  we have to reskill and upskill continually,  we must take discussions not just based on past experiences but based on insights from data and analytics.

The more data we can gather and analyze, the more insight we will gain; and the more our decisions are based on insights from data, the better decision we will likely make. Data and analytics give us a picture of the present and an idea of the future based on the trend.

The world is rapidly and radically changing, the marketplace is changing, customer expectations are changing, the work place is changing and we need to respond accordingly.

We must reinvent ourselves, and reinvent our businesses to create value in new and better ways to meet the present and future demands of the marketplace. And we need to do this leveraging emerging technologies.

This is the way to excel in today’s marketplace, this is the demand of the digital world.