Becoming a data driven business
Digital business is driven by data. Increasingly, leadership roles are moving from hands-on managers to individuals with digital skills to understand and apply analytical understanding of data for their discipline.
Business intelligence used to be about delivering dashboards to managers so they could keep track of key performance indicators that drive their activities and decisions.
Over recent years, businesses have learned to their cost that you have to pay managers to look at dashboards.
A smarter way to manage performance is to alert managers to the actionable insights that matter. Combining these learning lessons, leadership teams now recognize you need three things to become a data driven digital business:
- A way to capture data insights in real-time without key-fill of data
- A unifying data fabric across your enterprise to make data composable
- A people culture of curiosity armed with the right skills to constantly ask the right sorts of questions, to do better things and do things better
Bots monitor business activity
Software bots are really cheap to purchase and deploy. They offer a great instrument to auto-capture data insights. You can place bots strategically at various points in each process of your business to monitor work, data flows and system events. Then, you can harvest their intelligence to build digital business intelligence across your business.
Bots sort out data
One challenge businesses face is how to gather data together and transform it to make it useful.
Take data out of live back-office systems and, almost inevitably, the quality isn't what it needs to be. Fields are left empty, key-fill errors are rife, and relationships between entities will often need building.
AI bots can run algorithms to interpret the best data sources, learn how to cleanse data to remove manual cleansing and organizing--and port it into new, more useful structures.
Bots analyze data
The biggest reward of bots is to use them to make decisions on your behalf. In most use cases, there are lots of events and occurrences that are interesting but fall into the classification as 'business as usual.' What managers of processes normally want to understand are the exceptions, the capacity bottlenecks, the 'what-ifs.'
Will bots displace current business intelligence tools? What do you think?
