Organizations across the globe depend on actionable insights from their data to develop better services, enhance their competitive advantages, improve customer experiences, and more. A study collaborated on by Google, and Harvard Business Review found that 97% of business leaders felt that access to data across an organization is critical to its success.
Data Challenges in Modern Organizations
Modern organizations contain a vast number of data streams. Contact management systems, Salesforce.com, point of sale (POS) systems, inventory, production, workforce management systems, and homegrown software applications all contribute to today’s business’s digital morass. Daily, the list of data streams grows.
The operational activities of running a modern business create silos of data that need to be mined for actionable information. If you’re a fan of any of Discovery Channel’s shows about gold mining (Gold Rush, Gold Rush Whitewater, or Bearing Sea Gold), you know that paydirt is ground that contains sufficient enough ore to lead to big profits. Like mining for ore, each of the data streams running into those data silos in modern businesses become valuable paydirt. Getting at the valuable bits in that digital mine takes perseverance. Still, it can be worth it to gain insights that lead to keeping up with the competition, refining the customer experience, adjusting to expansions and mergers, or integrating new systems with existing ones.
As reported by Harvard Business Review, according to Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Omdia, most organizations are not yet availing themselves of the richness of the data paydirt streaming into their organizations. According to the researcher, less than 10% of companies have fully taken advantage of the value of data across the business. Getting immersed in the richness their data holds is critical for organizations to realize a digital transformation.
Analytics Across the Organization
Google Cloud is committed to helping organizations realize the potential of their data. So much so that the company recently offered a no-cost data analytics training for everyone from newbs to ninjas. The goal of the event was to get participants immersed in analytics and data processing.
Google believes that insights drive innovation. Some savvy organizations are already doing this well. These data-to-value leaders are identified in a study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Businesses operating at this level are consolidating data streams (both internal and external) and turning them into actionable information. Tools like Google Cloud Fusion, a fully managed tool that allows data integration at any scale, are beneficial in the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) operations.
Democratization of Insights
Businesses today know that to compete, they need to be data-driven. Taking action based on information is no longer confined to only the higher echelons of the organization. Now, everyone from the CEO to the customer service supervisor relies upon intelligence in their decision making. Those decisions can range from identifying the next target for acquisition to selecting a communication channel for reaching a customer. Here again, Google Cloud and Harvard Business Review confirm the need for democratization of information, “…97% of industry leaders surveyed said democratizing access to data and analytics across the organization is important to business success.”
But how does this democratization happen? For Google, it means the introduction of simplified tools that empower individuals to draw insights. These users include everyone from the data analyst to the business user. For the former, that meant unlocking new capabilities by expanding the ability to use SQL within the data warehouse. In the business user case, it meant breaking the “request and wait” paradigm by enabling easy-to-use interfaces for deriving insights.
Whether your data is trapped in silos due to organizational issues or because growth has resulted in incompatible systems, Google Analytics will enable you to break down those data silos. By democratizing data so that it’s easy to understand and readily available across the organization, you’ll gain valuable insights.
Speak with a Google Data expert today about real-time or batch ETL pipeline optimization, ETL, business intelligence, or using BiqQuery for your data warehouse needs.