MANY COMPANIES STRUGGLE TO FIND GOOD TECHNOLOGY TO CONNECT DATA STREAMS AND STRUGGLE EVEN MORE TO BUILD REPORTS. AS A RESULT, ORGANIZATIONS DON’T HAVE TIME TO ANALYZE THE DATA AVAILABLE TO THEM.

We know that analytics derived from data creates true value for businesses. As my colleague Tim argued, you can’t bring an opinion to a data fight. You can’t just collect data and call it a victory. That’s the equivalent of this famous meme going around.

Great. You have data. Now do something with it. Create added-value strategies around it.  

Data analytics provides insights into the business, helping organizations to better understand their customers’ wants and needs, and thus helping organizations differentiate themselves from their competitors. To successfully leverage the value that companies can gain from data analytics, organizations must change how they approach analytics.

Companies are now focusing on digital transformation to ensure they don’t get left behind. If you want to set your organization up for success, remember the 3 “I’s”: invest, innovate, and improvise.

INVEST

Every day, multiple data streams generate data for businesses from a variety of sources. These sets of business data can be used to derive valuable insights, which can be used to optimize business processes. While data holds the answers to most new business possibilities, businesses are still behind in taking advantage of all the opportunities that data offers. I’ve worked with organizations who are afraid to make the investment in data because when they tried to implement a solution in the past, their employees never made the leap to fully utilize the system.

Investing in your data could not only help you identify new market trends, identify future risks, monitor how your competitor is behaving, but also assist you in optimizing internal processes and prevent potential fraud.

Take taxi cabs vs. Uber, for example. Taxis would wait until someone would hail them to find work; Uber invested in data and discovered where rides would be needed, how many cars to send, and used data to set the price. The investment paid off.

Plain and simple: those organizations that don’t make the investment in their data will have a harder time competing against the businesses that do.

INNOVATE

Analytics aren’t static; they should drive actions and decisions and propel an organization toward its full potential.

By innovating, it allows organizations to have an efficient way to leverage data and takes their data analytics to the next level. I can think of five major areas where innovation is key:

• Big Data/Internet of Things: Leverage big data and machine data in real-time.

• Embedded Analytics: Amp up applications for internal and external users.

• Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics: Sharpen insights and improve the accuracy of decisions. (You can read our blog post about predictive analytics here.)

• AI-Assisted Analytics: Offer a smarter user experience with search, voice, and narration.

• Data Monetization: Profit more from your data through analytics that generates revenue and cut costs.

Data has changed the way businesses conduct themselves and it’s imperative to continue to innovate and not get complacent. As Li Keqiang said,

“CHANGES CALL FOR INNOVATION, AND INNOVATION LEADS TO PROGRESS.”

IMPROVISE

People get stuck in the same conversations, taking the same roads to work, and going through the same routine of every workday. Businesses, in the same way, get stuck running the same reports and often don’t look for new meanings. By exploring data, businesses improvise and find new ways to use data and therefore, new opportunities.

At Archetype, we help businesses gain new opportunities with data. Here are some of the specific industries we serve and how we support them.

The Financial Industry

A leading Boston-based private equity firm has a $15 billion portfolio containing a wide variety of funds, ventures, real estate, and operating companies across many disparate industries. They had issues with their quarterly consolidation process as well as an ineffective budgeting and planning process.

Since working with Archetype, the firm now has a solution that requires no re-keying of data or manual adjustments. The technology has unprecedented visibility and both portfolio managers and investors have extensive capabilities for analysis, modelling, and drill-through to investment level financial and non-financial metrics and KPIs.

The Healthcare Industry

An integrated healthcare provider was losing members at a rate faster than it was gaining new ones. Despite focusing considerable energies on patient satisfaction surveys and call-center feedback in the past two years, members continued to leave.

Leveraging data science and advanced analytics, Archetype helped them understand the root causes of their churn problem and presented a plan to address the situation.

The Public Sector

Archetype recently help a large University with improving its fundraising success and providing guidance to the Development team on where to prioritize their time. The institution was facing a number of obstacles due to a lack of information about their donor base.

Lack of understanding of what their donors looked like, difficulty in determining retention gaps, lack of understanding of inclination and finally difficulty in determining which non-donors were prospects for major giving portfolios.

Using predictive analytics Archetype developed profiles for those who had never given and provided the University with annual giving ask amounts. The client’s team plans on creating targeted outreach appeals using this information.