The promise - and the challenge - of Big Data can be summed up in one question. What Could You Do If You Knew? What key insight would you, or your executives, like to have? If you had that insight, how could you use that insight to improve your business? Your heads of Sales, Marketing, Product Development, and Supply Chain will likely have different answers. Let's help them articulate What They Could Do...If They Knew.
Let's use an automotive analogy. On any given day, we face thousands of decisions in real-time while driving our cars. Highway, or backroads? Drive the speed limit, or risk a ticket? How can I get the best gas mileage? Nowadays, we have an overabundance of information, feedback and data to contend with as we fly down the road. Which way do we need to look? The four most critical sources of data to a driver are likely the rear-view mirror, windshield, the dashboard, and the GPS.
Businesses are faced with many of the same challenges as drivers. Challenges of innovation, change, and speed in order to establish a competitive advantage, while managing risk. As with a vehicle, speed often dictates our options. For example, when the opportunity to enter a new market or adjust a marketing campaign presents itself, the need for insight grows exponentially as we consider our options to react while the clock is ticking. As questions are formulated both about the past and future, historical data provides only a starting point for decisions that will eventually impact our company’s future direction. It is clear that we need multiple sources of information and feedback in order to make better, faster decisions, both on- and off-road.
To get you started, consider the following vehicle analogies relative to your business. Ask yourself, and your executives, these questions about your business. Look for the gaps in "What Could You Do If You Knew?"
Rear-View Mirror
Where have we been? What historical information would empower us right now? Customer behavior, product or component performance, events tracked against global historical trends—all of these can be useful.
Windshield
Where are we now? More specifically, how can we enable a large, clean, unobstructed view of our business information? It’s important to eliminate blind spots and distorted views. Can we see across our customer, product and supplier ecosystem? Do we have a clear at-a-glance view of what’s going on right now? Is there anything we can’t see that we need to be able to see?
GPS
Where are we going? Assuming we did a good job on the first two, let’s apply a little more technology. For example, if we have a good history of customer behavior and a clear view of what’s going on in our world right now, then a little prediction goes a long way. Marketing might redirect campaign spend; production might shift build or ship schedules. Our teammates in Sales, Finance and Supply Chain do this all the time; forecasting, budgeting, material planning, etc. The better our crystal ball, the better decisions we can make.
Dashboard
Dashboards are essentially graphically enabled views of what’s going on, right now. Like an automotive dashboard, these are enabled with colors and highlights to draw attention to key items or outliers. This is a great delivery mechanism for pad-based or phone based mobile displays. A key target here is commonality; business dashboards, like automotive dashboards, should be equally informative to any user.
Let's start with these questions, aimed at your business needs. In future posts, we'll dive deeper into how your peers in a variety of industries are using these questions in order to make Big Data a tool for business growth.
