Business analytics isn’t new technology news; companies have been collecting data on their customers and their products for years. But digital technology has enabled real-time analytics, which allows business leaders to make faster and more subtle shifts in strategy to accommodate any volatility in the market. Let’s look at how real-time data can help your company stay ahead.
Real-Time Analytics Means Real-Time Agility
Real-time streaming analytics is the next wave in our efforts to capture data and use it to our advantage. Streaming analytics gives business leadership a more accurate understanding of their data in-flight. The benefits are obvious; enterprise organizations must relearn the agility of their startup days or suffer disruption from innovative entrepreneurs. Real-time analytics can help business leaders make on the fly decisions to compete with the latest companies in their industry, making the front-page technology news.
Predictive analytics takes all that real-time data and combines it with an algorithm to become a Magic 8 Ball. These tools use artificial intelligence (AI) processes to look at past and current data and predict how the market will perform in the future or which of your products will sell or even which marketing techniques will yield the most significant impact. You can see predictive analytics at work in the latest bell curve of COVID-19 cases. It’s a way to maximize the efficiency of the data at hand and use it to make more accurate predictions on which business decisions will pay off in the future.
Here are three examples of how companies use real-time analytics to improve their bottom line:
- Real-time data can help you create key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive output. It’s a way to take past performance and overlay it against the market and your team’s abilities and efforts. KPIs give you a touchpoint for how individuals and departments are performing. These can and should shift depending on a variety of factors, and real-time data can inform your efforts to respond.
- Real-time data gives you the power to base decisions on the analytics. There is little need anymore for business leadership to make arbitrary emotion-driven decisions. Instead, real-time data can provide the touchpoints to roadmap each corporate initiative. When combined with predictive analytics, you can even see the potential outcomes of each decision. It’s all guesswork, of course, but having the data eliminates some of the risks, even during the very uncertain times that we’re all existing in today.
- Real-time data creates a single source of truth. Data Economy says, “Perhaps one of the biggest enemies of good decision-making is data overflow and disparity.” We gather data from multiple channels each day. Many times, we see this data as siloed lakes of information that, depending on how you slice and dice them, can provide information that is contradictory and confusing for business leadership to interpret. Unifying data streams into one real-time analytics portal helps organizations have a more holistic picture of their performance.
Predictive analytics takes real-time data and turns it into a crystal ball for decision-making.
Real-time data analytics offers even the largest companies a chance to move more quickly in their business decision-making process. This will allow them to stay ahead of more agile small organizations that are undercutting their market share. These tools will help business leadership compete in increasingly complex global markets recently racked by the COVID-19 crisis.