How cloud analytics can navigate business uncertainty

We are at a turning point in how business is conducted, and how people interact and collaborate. From working remotely and sharing data and files through the cloud to hosting elaborate business meetings on video calls, workplaces globally have shifted towards a digital hybrid approach.

Cloud computing is driving this new way of work, and cloud-based based analytics promises to revolutionise how businesses operate and grow. By facilitating powerful data processing at far faster speeds and at scale, enterprises can analyse data more rapidly and deliver data-driven decision intelligence at the speed business demands: a much-needed cure for a turbulent economic environment where businesses need to ‘see around corners’ and mitigate the rapid shifts and uncertainties of today’s world.

In fact, recent Alteryx research on the State of Cloud Analytics found that decision-makers across large companies globally expect cloud analytics to have a positive impact during economic uncertainty, with nearly 90% agreeing cloud analytics have helped them be more profitable.

Today, the world’s most successful businesses are those that democratise the data and insight generation process — for all employees at all skill levels — to deliver decision intelligence across the entire organisation.

Cloud-based analytics’ biggest potential impact comes from operationalising cloud data for competitive insights and delivering data-driven decision-making at scale. It puts the power of analytics into every worker’s hands so they can get the insights they need from huge amounts of data in order to identify critical patterns and trends more easily.

So how does a business create an all-inclusive and effective analytics strategy?

Identify the right problems to solve

Any business leader embarking on a cloud analytics journey will undoubtedly have a problem in mind to solve. Just as the automatic telephone exchange was invented due to the irritation felt at misrouted calls, so too must your business begin the process of change by asking: “what irritates us most?” That problem itself may not have an immediate solution, but with accessible and scalable data and analytics tools in place, it becomes far more achievable for all.

As with any journey, the key is to start small and work up to larger challenges. It’s important to consider your desired business outcome before working backwards to achieve it. By assessing the potential risk versus the benefit of the insight generated, it is easier to scale and formulate wider use cases. Developing the right processes, role responsibilities, and baseline standards — the core facets of data governance — is a critical next step of scaling this process into something that delivers far more consistent business benefits.

Assess what data and tools you have, and how you want to use them

An early-stage challenge for any business looking to get started on its analytic journey is finding out what data it already has. All businesses — in one way or another — have datasets that can be used for insights that can significantly impact business decisions. Some believe that to pull valuable insights, you need to have vast amounts of data to work on; however, many data projects use relatively small datasets to deliver disproportionate value. The critical consideration is the quality of the data — not the quantity. In truth, data analytics don’t have to be complex or solve a million dollars’ worth of business challenges immediately. It’s enough to start with small projects that can even be done quickly in the beginning, using small, simple data sets. This provides the opportunity to start small and scale up big.

Setting up for, and building on, success

Demonstrating small, easily replicable and scalable successes is important to continue driving benefits. By positioning these successes as both financially viable and easily repeatable, we can begin to generate the political capital and buy-in needed to expand a data project further.

However, the true value of successful analytics work comes from automating the analysis and democratising the insights. The ability to utilise analytics-enabled domain experts — the actual adopters of these insights, those who know the business process they relate to and the business questions to ask — will be able to rapidly adapt to changing market demands.

Implement, expand and replicate

Once data access and preparation processes have been completed, businesses can begin to democratise access to that data and begin transforming it into a business insight. Training those closest to the problem to provide quick answers to questions is one of the most significant benefits of implementing a data-driven strategy. It’s also a benefit that is highly achievable. With a firm cloud-based analytic foundation grounded on assessment, preparation and identification, it is easier to expand the remit of the work done and scale across the wider business.

With 70% of enterprises planning to put most of their analytics solutions in the cloud by 2025, leaders need to work across the right organisation to build the right analytics strategy for their business. Only then can they gain the maximum return from their cloud analytics investments and propel them further than their competitors in today’s ever-digitising — and economically turbulent — environment.

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