The Benefits of Being a Data-Driven Company

Data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to find new customers. As with previous technological advances, not embracing it in time is a risk - the market may eventually shut your company out.

Are not All Companies Data-Driven?

Short answer: yes. In a sense, any company works by making decisions based on information, may it be a tip from another person in the market or one’s intuition. Nothing can replace a person’s intuition, of course, and studies show that intuition is still one of the best qualities to use when making decisions. However, you need to train that intuition because when data is too complex intuition starts to fall short.

The term data-driven now strictly refers to companies that make use of analytics based on information technology and data collection as a primary resource for information. A study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute indicated that data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to get customers than companies that ignore data science. It is huge: it is not 50% more, it is 2300% more chances to get new customers.

This is the reason why the most successful companies nowadays make intuitive decisions based on proper market analysis – you may regard data analysis as ‘augmented intuition.’ The market analysis used to be complicated, not enough customer data was available, and you would do the computations with a pen and paper. It was useful, but yet not that reliable.

Now things have changed. MIT researchers showed that enough data is available, contrary to the general opinion. Most companies own enough data to make better decisions, but that data is poorly managed and poorly processed and analyzed. So you do have enough data in our field, you just do not take advantage of it.

How Do I Benefit from Being Data-Driven?

First of all, Instead of guessing, you begin to know. Questions like “Will my client buy this pink dress?” or “What percentage of pink dresses and what percentage of blue dresses should I buy?” had an intuitive answer: 30 pink, 40 blue. That decision was not informed, nor was it accurate or optimized. By studying data from customers, your decisions become more profitable and more accurate.

Bigstep provides the infrastructure for you to store and analyze data. You do not need to purchase expensive equipment and then hire a whole IT team. You need a Bigstep account and a good data analyst; then you are good to go. Whether you are a company that does polls, a retailer, an online shop, or a company that provides services, you need data collection and analysis at a top level. Gradually, companies that avoid updating the way they do business and connect with customers will lose more and more ground and market share to companies that do, until they become obsolete.

Just like with any other technological progress of the past, companies that do not begin to adopt the new technologies are left behind.

Some examples of use-cases

Let’s begin with health, as health and medicine are crucial, and the same McKinsey Global Institute showed that 30% of all data generated on the planet is health related. Using data-driven modeling, you may find out information about patients that was impossible before. You can study the impact of a drug on a population; you can find connections between some symptoms and certain diseases, and so on. The same applies to different types of scientific studies that were virtually impossible to compute with pen and paper or the computing power of a single PC. When you have data from thousands or millions of entries, one computer is not enough.

In sales and publicity, the use cases are more evident. Using the data of your customers, you find out their buying patterns, and this helps you adjust your offers and purchase quantities. You may find out that a person that buys a certain type of car, for example, also purchases a certain type of furniture - things that may seem unrelated to a human mind. This why major companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook, know better what kind of ads to show you.

How Do I Begin?

The first steps resumed in short with bullets points are:

• Start collecting more data as soon as possible, and also try to recover the data from previous years.
• Store that data safely.
• Hire a data analyst to be able to do more complex analysis.
• Get the infrastructure that enables the data scientist to do complex analysis and transfer the data there.

How Does Bigstep Help?

Bigstep provides the infrastructure, computational power and optionally the software and licenses required by the data analyst.

Embracing a new technology may look harder then it is. If something becomes adopted by big companies, it means it has reached enough level of simplicity so that your company, with some help and training, can accomplish it as well.

Bigstep makes it even easier. Simple user interfaces, one-click solutions, subscriptions adaptable to needs, makes it easier for you to store and process data. Compared to what was available a couple of years back or is provided by other companies, Bigstep excels at delivering premium solutions that are easy to use and affordable.

Contact us for further information, and receive a personalized quotation based on your particular company details, tailored to your needs.