Every business activity creates a digital trace. Therefore, businesses need to deal with an overwhelming amount of data daily. The growing importance of data has started to change the nature of competition in the business world. If you’re using it to your advantage and carefully include it as part of your IT strategy, data will help you to stifle your competition.
No surprise that data has been referred to as “a new commodity”, “the oil of the digital era” recently.
Having more data available than ever has certainly its advantages and disadvantages. Data helps to improve products and services, increase customer satisfaction, maximize profitability, and operate more effectively. It also enables the development of artificial intelligence and machine learnings that extract value from data. Based on data algorithms can predict future events more accurately.
However, businesses also engage in more and more data sharing which can result in issues. Different IT systems may generate data in different formats that other systems cannot process. Sometimes the data enrichment and validation is a must that traditional systems are not capable of.
Obviously, we are living in a data economy in which every business needs to become a digital business: going through a data-driven transformation is a must.
To ensure you are making the most out of your data, you need to invest in digital transformation. We defined three key elements that will help you to start your path of utilizing your available data better.
Assess your data
When you are assessing the data available you need to define how you could use it to your advantage. You will need to ask a few questions of yourself. Where is your business standing today? How will you utilize your available data? Do you want to add a new digital business model to your business or you want that the core business would remain the same, but processes would be more digital? Do you want to digitalize your operations or your supply chain? What benefits do you expect from digital transformation? What KPIs could you improve because of digitalization? What financial benefits do you expect to see when you successfully exploited all the available data?
As part of the assessment process, remember to think of your competition as well. You will objectively see your situation, how you could win the most against them with the help of your data.
Answering all these questions will help you to start shaping your digitalization strategy. Having a clear reason to invest in digitalization will help you to find the solution that suits your needs the most, as well as the chances for a successful strategy implementation, are better.
Would you like to read more? Discover the 3 reasons for starting to use a data integration tool. Click here to read more.
Define a data-driven digital strategy
By the time, you start defining your data-driven digital strategy, you most probably answered all the questions above and you know your goals you want to achieve, the benefits you can see from using your data better, as well as what challenges will stand on your way to completely transform your operations.
Many think of digital transformation as a risk to undertake that will result in heavy financial investments. However, you don’t need to reinvent the core IT systems. You should spend your transformation investment on an agile data connectivity and integration solution. Most IT systems are not able to meet the data requirements of our data economy. Organizations still operate with disparate data sources, lack of real-time data sharing, have a tremendous amount of data in native format, and the quality of the data is not satisfactory. These are slowing down the process of your digital transformation. You must put data governance and data infrastructure improvements on the top of your digital strategy.
An agile data connectivity solution that is fast to develop and implement is a necessary tool for your business to start utilizing the oil of the digital era. Data connectivity solutions help you to streamline your business processes, automate them, eliminate manual processes, achieve EBITDA gains by lowering operating costs and therefore improving margins.
Investing in a digital transformation strategy is an enormous challenge. Start your journey with small projects that will demonstrate that your approach is right and the implementation would start to pay back itself quickly.
Take control of your data
When you take full control over your data, you will be able to drive fast value from your data transformation.
Consider using a cloud platform for your connectivity needs, assess your options and find the right infrastructure for your needs that will utilize your legacy IT systems, allow you to have full control over your data with full visibility. As a result, your operations will be more innovative, agile, efficient, and you will be able to improve customer satisfaction.
Being ahead of your competition is probably the goal of everyone. With the right strategy and infrastructure, you can create your own advantage in this data-driven world.
