I was asked in my last meeting as to how data can help in winning and retaining customers, and also excelling in customer experience. In our conversation, the pattern started to appear. The challenge was not that the client was not aware of the importance of data; her main concern was that her team was busy managing the data instead of managing the customers.

How many times we have seen and heard this, and yet it still is touch and go.

Even when organizations have started to give Analytics and Data Science its due importance by making it a strategic investment unit, still the research says 82% of all the data analytics projects do not get to see successful closure.

“Are you one of the 18% of all the companies to see Data Analytics projects through to the successful closures?”

One of the problems, which I have seen with several of my clients is that they tend to place all their bets on data. For them, it meant hiring a team of data fanatics, getting big data and cloud storage, purchasing expensive data reporting tools, and hoping to see that data would work for them to get the business insights they needed.

The results were not encouraging. My answer to them was undata yourself.

There is no doubt that data is an asset, and it needs to be managed well to give you the return that you expect. If you were to go from descriptive analytics to cognitive analytics i.e. from plain bar charts to predict how your customers will decide on your product, ask these questions:

+ Do you have the right mix of people in your team, or are they all data experts?

+ Do you have the right roadmap to support your futuristic plans?

+ Do you have the right partner to guide you and help you build your capability?

+ Do you have effective processes that can help you in focusing on results instead of data?

+ What about business experts who can read and understand the insights?

For example, in a recent engagement with one of the largest and well-known financial institutions, we were called to help them in setting up a data analytics shop. Though the institution had a good head start in analytics efforts, they were struggling to make headway from proof of concept to monetization and realization. Organizational culture and upskilling were two of the five primary areas they needed to focus on as much as investing in technological advancements.