‘In God we trust, all other must bring data’ said late William Edward Deming – the famous  American statistician and professor. Gut based decision making is out, subjectivity is out, generic experience based decisions are out – Data driven decisions are in.

 

Data Science is the buzzdata driven consultingword these days in most of the organisations. Business units which drive sales, marketing, finance or manage risk drives the CXOs through the huge amount of data they are collecting and processing. Data in its purest form may not drive any decision but data analytics based advice and those solutions are driving decisions. Data to analytics to insights to action is the typical decision making cycle in these data driven organisations. In the Indian context, while the top two consulting & the Big four continue to drive the strategic and advisory business for the bigger corporate groups on the strategic consulting and  decisions, boutique data driven consulting and analytics firm continue to capture the share from them on data driven decisions. Given the empirical evidence of various studies done in past that any organisation which who have used  analytics to drive decisions have outperformed their peers by five percent in productivity and six percent in profitability.

 

Actionable decisions are being derived through statistical models whether based on prescriptive or predictive analytics exercises. Every organisation may have their own priorities in terms of assessing their customer behaviour – they may take decisions based on what that various customer cohorts tells them collectively or what the next best action suitable for each  customer based on various predictive modeling techniques.

 

The drivers of the decision makers are usually the business teams who put forth the problems or the Use cases to the BI and analytics teams who then work backwards to drive solutions for the same. In some cases the analytics teams continues to drive Business teams by putting forth some use cases created on their own basis the ongoing data in various areas. It is time Indian organisations use data driven consultants rather than relying on pure play strategic consultants.

 

Follow

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *