Pervasive Intelligence Now

Enabling Game-Changing Outcomes in the Age of Exponential Data

Anu Jain

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119558873
• eBook ISBN: 9781119558859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

This book looks at strategies to help companies become more intelligent, connected, and agile. It discusses how companies can define and measure high-impact outcomes and use effectively analytics technology to achieve them. It also looks at the technology needed to implement the analytics necessary to achieve high-impact outcomes—from both analytics tool and technical infrastructure perspective. Also discussed are ancillary, but critical, topics such as data security and governance that may not traditionally be a part of analytics discussions but are essential in helping companies maintain a secure environment for their analytics and access the quality data they need to gain critical insights and drive better decision-making.

PART 1
Strategies to Make Intelligence Pervasive

New technologies and automation have increased fraud and compliance risk, at a time when customers are demanding innovative new products and services, and shareholders are demanding that companies unlock the greatest value from all their physical, intellectual, and digital assets. There’s no break—no time to breathe before the next problem hits.

These challenges are exacerbated by fragmented intelligence. Analytics capabilities are siloed, so decision-making is hobbled by poor insight into customer behavior and operations. Innovation is stifled and customer satisfaction plummets. Losses from compliance violations and fraud mount, and supply chains become sluggish. This lethal mix leaves many companies foundering and unable to satisfy anyone: shareholders, customers, or regulatory agencies. The need to have sound strategies that enable you to make data intelligence pervasive and compete with your analytics capabilities is paramount.

The strategies you develop to make intelligence pervasive must be finely attuned to achieving high-impact outcomes—those outcomes that power your success. What’s more, it’s essential to understand the value you get from data—the information yield—so that you can make decisions on whether to add to, or change, your analytics capabilities and/or technical infrastructure.

As for your technical infrastructure, the strategies you use to store data and access it for analytics capabilities will play an outsized role in helping—or hindering—your effort to drive high-impact outcomes. The cloud has emerged as a go-to option for many companies, but there are a multitude of cloud-deployment options and you must have a clearly developed cloud strategy, with a trusted vendor partner to wring value from the cloud.

In addition to realizing the transformative power of the cloud for managing data workloads gaining flexibility, companies that succeed will leverage digital connectivity to revolutionize the way they acquire resources, move products, and serve customers.

Successful companies will also realize that analytics systems should be built with the people who will use them in mind. They won’t buy technology just because it’s “hot.” Instead, they will use the principle of cognitive design to build applications that meet users’ needs and facilitate better insight and decision-making.

These companies will also understand that, even though data governance and security aren’t necessarily the most exciting topics, they are critical to the success of their analytics effort. If users don’t trust the answers they get from the system, they won’t use it, and if customers and partners don’t trust you to shepherd their data, they’ll defect in droves.

In short, companies that succeed in the pressure-cooker of intense global competition and ever-increasing demands to build shareholder value will devise successful strategies to help them embed intelligence at the cellular level to define and achieve business outcomes that have the biggest positive impact on their future.

CHAPTER 1
Achieving High-Impact Outcomes—An Overview

The sole reason to embed data intelligence into your organization—to make it pervasive—is to help you make better decisions that lead to achieving high-impact outcomes. To get the information you need to make better decisions, it’s crucial to have the ability to develop customized analytics applications quickly, and scale them up or down based on intelligence needs.

This means that you are becoming—or need to become—like a software company, whether you want to or not. Therefore, your IT strategy and technology expectations must reflect this premise.

For example, artificial intelligence and digital supply networks can enable you to become more agile by providing the ability to better understand and interpret your environment and become more responsive to business and market needs. However, the foundation of this agility is the technical infrastructure that supports all these dynamic technologies. If that infrastructure is not cutting-edge and flexible, it can’t support innovative technologies.

Software companies (meaning your company!) need technical infrastructures that are more akin to those of utility companies. On a hot summer day, do you contact your local electric supplier to make more wattage available to your house in order to run your air conditioner? No, you get billed for what you utilize.

The same is true for intelligence capabilities. Establishing the infrastructure enables you to quickly access the resources you need to develop and deploy intelligence capabilities when and where you need them, and to make that intelligence pervasive.

Pervasive data intelligence is all about driving game-changing outcomes. It doesn’t matter what problems you have, or which tools you buy to solve them, it’s the results that matter. How well did your strategy work? How well did it solve your problems and enhance your ability to compete in a cutthroat environment that kills businesses without mercy? How well did it enable you to meet your high-impact outcomes?

To create those high-impact outcomes—outcomes that have a significant effect on your company’s bottom line and that will help you thrive in today’s digitally transformed marketplace—you need three things:

1. The right data to help you gain the insights you seek
2. A technical architecture and environment that stresses flexibility and scalability
3. Operational excellence, facilitated by the right data and the right technology, integrated with your organizational operations

Simple, right? No: but it is doable.

Figure 1.1

THE RIGHT DATA

Customer demands to innovate and provide better, more personalized, customer service—coupled with shareholder demands to increase share value and speed their ROI—have created a critical need for companies to better leverage data for decision-making. However, amidst the inundation of big data, it’s often difficult to tease out valuable data from noise.

To get the data you need, you first have to understand your business needs. By asking the right questions, you can get the answers you seek, and get started on wringing the data you need out of the wash of data that floods your company every day.

First, ask your managers and knowledge workers what data they need to do their jobs. That’s the data that will drive value and create those high-impact outcomes that will help you thrive. Next, look at the questions you’re asking. What data do you need to answer those questions and gain those critical insights that speed and enhance decision-making?

It’s not enough anymore to satisfy your customers. You must delight them. Customers want to feel as if you know them—what they need, what they want, and, most importantly, what they don’t know they want.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on the data your people need to do their jobs and to answer the questions you have, put that data to use. Ask how you can use the data to improve your customer service. It’s not enough anymore to satisfy your customers. You must delight them.

To delight them, it’s critical to create a sense of greater intimacy between your business and your customers. Customers want to feel as if you know them—what they need, what they want, and, most importantly, what they don’t know they want.

Next, use that data to innovate—both in terms of what you offer the market and how you operate your business. Social media has changed the market landscape and businesses that don’t constantly innovate die more quickly than ever. Innovation won’t be possible, however, unless your business is operating at its optimal level. To do that, you must constantly innovate your operations to achieve and maintain operational excellence.

Finally, the right data can also help you mitigate risk. There’s no reward without risk, but too much risk leads to disaster. What’s more, the types of risks have multiplied exponentially (fraud, cybersecurity, market, economic, political) and it’s essential to evaluate them appropriately and manage them effectively. It’s essential to integrate technology—especially AI—into all aspects of risk management.

There’s one caveat to getting and using the right data. Do it quickly, so that you can move on to the next step: designing the architecture and environment you need to leverage that data.

THE RIGHT TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Strategies to Make Intelligence Pervasive
• Part II Technology to Achieve Pervasive Intelligence
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement