Listen to this articleData analytics is shaping the future. There’s so much data out there, but a lot of organizations are still figuring out how to capitalize on it. Studies have shown that over 70 percent of data goes unused. Unleashing the power of data analytics will invigorate your enterprise. Here’s how.
Identify Hidden Relationships
People like to say that correlation doesn’t equal causation. While this may be the case, there’s still a huge issue of identifying correlation in the first place. Oftentimes, it’s near impossible to spot a correlation between variables with the human eye alone.
Welcome to a new era of data analytics, where it’s now possible for us to identify correlations that previously would have gone completely unnoticed—or taken a significant amount of time to manually uncover. Greater capabilities in this department are largely being driven by advances in artificial intelligence-powered analytics.
A normal person would struggle to find these discrete correlations because it would take an unreasonable amount of time to parse through billions of data points by hand. AI algorithms, on the other hand, can do this in seconds.
Boost Your KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are how enterprises measure current versus past performance. These metrics are considered to be the driving analytics measures that are most important to the organization’s bottom line.
For a manufacturer, the time it takes to assemble a certain widget and profit per widget sold might be KPIs. When looking at sales analytics, there are some major KPIs that data analytics can help track and analyze. ThoughtSpot is one example of an analytics platform that works well for sales analytics because it allows employees to ask questions and receive answers in seconds.
These tools can be useful for sales teams because they provide insights in a format that’s easy for non-data specialists to understand and analyze. This empowers teams to query data, drill down into the results, and make timely decisions as a result. This ability can provide a competitive advantage in the fast-paced world of sales, especially when teams are able to make adjustments based on data.
Spot Developing Trends
Not all analytics are about understanding what happened. When you’re running a business, it’s important to be focused on the future and moving forward. Seeing developing trends and predicting what’s next are within the scope of data analytics today.
What are some of the possible implications of using analytics in this way? The most prominent benefit is that actions don’t need to just be reactive. They can actually be proactive. Think about an industry that has undergone significant change—retail for instance. Today, it’s obvious e-commerce is a growing force in how people buy things. But not long ago, this wasn’t clear based on intuition alone. Predictive data analytics can look at current and past data in order to give a projection of what’s to come. Organizations looking to stay relevant into the future need to consider the power of this.
Get More People Using Analytics
With the old way of doing analytics, all the power of data was concentrated in the hands of a few people. Every time an employee wanted answers that required analysis, they needed to send a request to the data team, which could then take days or weeks to send back an answer.
This process is clearly inefficient. But it has a few other drawbacks as well. Data professionals are forced to spend their time working on a log of inquiries instead of focusing on more strategic tasks. This system also makes it more challenging for employees to get answers to follow-up questions, as static reports only contain certain information.
When companies implement relational search—an analytics feature that allows users to find answers in data similarly to how they find answers through a search engine—everything gets streamlined. More people are finding insights. It also takes significantly less time to arrive at actionable insights than with the old method. Furthermore, artificial intelligence-driven analytics uses powerful algorithms to dive into data and pull out patterns that were previously going unnoticed.
These are a few of the ways businesses are utilizing data analytics today. Implementing an analytics strategy in your organization can greatly improve operations.
