Analytics Are Key To Understanding and Managing What Makes You Unique
Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash
Every firm has a ‘secret sauce’ that is the key to lasting success for any business. Building enduring success requires a full understanding of the recipe and how it needs to change to respond to changing markets. History provides many examples; two are Best Buy/Circuit City and Google/AOL. Four articles (links are at the end of this post) relate to these ideas in different ways.
One of the articles declared that analytics is the secret sauce. The reality is that analytics is the key to understanding the recipe for your sauce. Everyone has analytics. Getting reliable and usable information from your analysis is what matters.
Over 90 percent of the data in the world today was created in the last few years. With descriptions of exabytes, zettabyte, and yottabyte, the amount of data is, in many ways, incomprehensible. Most data is now created by machines or tracked from sensors. As the use of AI and IoT continues to grow, the amount of data generated will expand even faster. This growth creates opportunities to use information in different ways to gain a competitive advantage.
The sheer amount of data also brings risk. Without proper care, it is possible to provide flawed information that will lead to bad decisions. Well designed analytics need to be continuously monitored. Source data continually evolves. Whether it is customer preferences, competitive intelligence, supplier inputs, or any other essential data source, the analytics needs to adapt to the new data. AI, when well designed, adapts effectively. But when new data disrupts the underlying assumptions that are implicit in the original algorithm, the results can become misleading.
As our reliance on AI driven analytics increases to make sense of vast amounts of data, our need as humans to look at things from different points of view becomes more important. It is natural to look at dashboards and not question the labels. An imperfect analogy is the ‘time remaining’ estimate for your laptop battery. The calculation is based on recent past use. We have all encountered times when the estimate was over four hours, but we really had less than three.
We all need to be data driven, but we need to question our data to make sure we understand it.
MIT Sloan - Why analytics is the ‘secret sauce’ of startup success
Speed Scientific - How Much Data Is Created Every Day? [27 Powerful Stats]
MIT Sloan - How data fuels the move to smart manufacturing
Wired - Police built an AI to predict violent crime. It was seriously flawed
The Conversation - People With Creative Personalities Really Do See the World Differently
