Continued from my previous article "Insights - Below the line"
Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, Aviation etc. are some of the industries that thrive on huge volume of customers. Customer interaction channels – ERP/CRM Systems, Social Media and Online Systems etc. – provide ample data to understand various facets of customer behaviour. Vast data is analysed for personalized engagement with individual customers. Each customer interaction provides an opportunity to influence buying behaviour, churn and decisions that affect profitability. One who takes the lead is the organisation that can extract data driven insights faster, react faster than its competition while providing its customers with personalized experiences.
Unlike traditional BI in which the focus primarily used to be on ‘What happened?’, analytics is now focusing on ‘What will happen?’ and ‘What needs to be done to make it happen?’. The other fundamental shift is how the decision making insights are being perceived. BI used to facilitate senior management to make strategic or tactical decisions. Analytics is helping more into operational activities, empowering executives and mid management to take decisions. Also, it smoothens and speeds up the operational activities.
Analytics empowers business users to directly interact with data as they follow their instincts in uncovering customer behaviour embedded in transactions. Operational insights related to customer profiling, segmentation, predictive modelling, campaign management and ad-hoc analysis can be retrieved on the fly, in minutes or seconds, without any need of sophisticated programming, technical or SQL related knowledge. Users can assess selection and segmentation strategies by creating actual counts using easily manageable wide range of customized and complex marketing selection criteria rather than estimates. Insights are supported by charts, grids, Venn diagrams and variety of other data visualization tools with formatting & drill-down options. The results of analyses can be integrated directly into business processes like campaign management. Cause and effect of business activities can be understood to improve the planning and execution of marketing programs.
As users or marketers do right customer profiling and segmentation, they shift from mass marketing to more engaging conversations with individual customers. Customer Centric marketing leads to determining the right campaign per customer instead of the right customer per campaign. Speed and flexibility enable ad hoc, ‘train of thought’ analysis of anything against anything. Users learn more about their business on their terms and in their time frame, reducing the overall cost of analysis. This ultimately results in increased sales; both up-sale and cross-sale, through the ability to run campaigns more frequently and with a higher degree of precision.
Paradigm is shifting. Technology is getting more business centric. Users, having business understanding and little common sense but no programming skills, are now able to use technology with ease. Dependence on IT is reducing. Can we do away with IT? Certainly not!!!
IT is the creator of these applications. Updates, patches, maintenance and administration etc. are some of the services we cannot do away with. For any BI or Analytical application, integration with multiple source systems, data loading, data cleansing, master data management and reporting through one or more applications are always going to be handled by IT teams. It’s the fine balance between IT and business that’s going to run a successful show. The question is, how do you define the fine balance between Business & IT?
Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, Retail, Aviation etc. are some of the industries that thrive on huge volume of customers. Customer interaction channels – ERP/CRM Systems, Social Media and Online Systems etc. – provide ample data to understand various facets of customer behaviour. Vast data is analysed for personalized engagement with individual customers. Each customer interaction provides an opportunity to influence buying behaviour, churn and decisions that affect profitability. One who takes the lead is the organisation that can extract data driven insights faster, react faster than its competition while providing its customers with personalized experiences.
Unlike traditional BI in which the focus primarily used to be on ‘What happened?’, analytics is now focusing on ‘What will happen?’ and ‘What needs to be done to make it happen?’. The other fundamental shift is how the decision making insights are being perceived. BI used to facilitate senior management to make strategic or tactical decisions. Analytics is helping more into operational activities, empowering executives and mid management to take decisions. Also, it smoothens and speeds up the operational activities.
Analytics empowers business users to directly interact with data as they follow their instincts in uncovering customer behaviour embedded in transactions. Operational insights related to customer profiling, segmentation, predictive modelling, campaign management and ad-hoc analysis can be retrieved on the fly, in minutes or seconds, without any need of sophisticated programming, technical or SQL related knowledge. Users can assess selection and segmentation strategies by creating actual counts using easily manageable wide range of customized and complex marketing selection criteria rather than estimates. Insights are supported by charts, grids, Venn diagrams and variety of other data visualization tools with formatting & drill-down options. The results of analyses can be integrated directly into business processes like campaign management. Cause and effect of business activities can be understood to improve the planning and execution of marketing programs.
As users or marketers do right customer profiling and segmentation, they shift from mass marketing to more engaging conversations with individual customers. Customer Centric marketing leads to determining the right campaign per customer instead of the right customer per campaign. Speed and flexibility enable ad hoc, ‘train of thought’ analysis of anything against anything. Users learn more about their business on their terms and in their time frame, reducing the overall cost of analysis. This ultimately results in increased sales; both up-sale and cross-sale, through the ability to run campaigns more frequently and with a higher degree of precision.
Paradigm is shifting. Technology is getting more business centric. Users, having business understanding and little common sense but no programming skills, are now able to use technology with ease. Dependence on IT is reducing. Can we do away with IT? Certainly not!!!
IT is the creator of these applications. Updates, patches, maintenance and administration etc. are some of the services we cannot do away with. For any BI or Analytical application, integration with multiple source systems, data loading, data cleansing, master data management and reporting through one or more applications are always going to be handled by IT teams. It’s the fine balance between IT and business that’s going to run a successful show. The question is, how do you define the fine balance between Business & IT?
Hey, This is very true that BI is playing very critical role today’s environment, not even in business terms but also it is involved in our personal day to day routine as well. Like I don’t want to write and code, not really interested in doing any analysis with data, but I need simple report with results only, which actually help me to take the quick decisions. You made a very good point in your blog that while having everything on my fingertips but we can’t go away with the IT, it also plays a very important role to have such kind of solutions. While having both the things, there must be a perfect balance between BI and IT, otherwise it’s going to be a disaster.
ReplyDeleteSylvain Tassé posted on LinkedIn:-
ReplyDeleteThat is indeed an excellent question that unfortunately does not have a single answer to as the dependancy on IT will vary with the industry. We can make a comparison to the evolution of the usage of computers in companies. In the beginning computers were exclusively used by IT (or its predecessors) to solve difficult mathematical problems in search of solutions that the human brain would simply take too long to calculate. It then moved to a mainframe computer with remote terminals accross the company, bringing computing power closer to the end user, removing IT's partial role of <> . Then the PC replaced the terminals and as the increasing need for more computing power to the end user rose, coupled with more affordable powerfull computers, companies rolled out workstations which gave even more ownership to the end user. Research departments in need of even faster computers were given access to Data Centers, through their PC to run huge calculations. Again the role of IT was ever changing but always required, but we're now seeing Supercomputers (CX1 from Cray) being deployed in office environment to bring dedicated computing power to the user. I think the evolution of Business Intelligence tools is following a similar trend where the goal is to remove the layers between the Data and the End User while ensuring it is being delivered swiftly, accuratly and effeciently. The role of Data Visualization does this very well.
Mark Littlefield posted on LinkedIn:-
ReplyDeleteI think you need to align IT with the business, so both IT and the business are providing value to the business, then IT and end users are focused on business value to the customer and consumers.
Somebody remarked that an intune IT team means the world in today's online market however 9 times out of 10 are not marketers.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. However, the fundamentals remain the same. The guiding technology that sets the foundation is almost the same. The same layers of disparate databases, ETL scripts, schemas, analytics and multi-channel reporting etc. If the analytical power is proving its mettle for marketers, it wouldn't be long for this to happen in other arenas as well. Technology will keep on evolving. It's a fact that analytics is becoming intuitive and both my article and the question arise from my discussions across the industry. I have initiated this to discuss the viewpoints under the Sun, though through the window of my current domain.