Business leaders must embrace modern tools to future-proof their companies

Balancing endless requests to reduce their costs with the need to advance their digitisation and transformation efforts, business leaders desperately need a new tactic

The 2020s have – so far – been defined by global reactions to unforeseen crises. From turbulent economies and energy crises to supply chain nightmares, the current level of constant crisis is giving many business leaders sleepless nights.

While the worst of the COVID pandemic is certainly behind us, the current business environment is still awash in risk and uncertainty. With persistently high inflation, rocketing interest rates and ongoing geopolitical instability, business leaders are facing more mission-critical – and more time-sensitive – choices on a daily basis.

The word “permacrisis” was recently ranked as the Collins Dictionary “word of the year”, and – ultimately – there could have been no better choice. Recent research from PwC underlined the existential choice facing executives in 2023.

According to the findings, 22% of businesses said they “do not believe their business will be economically viable within a decade on their current course”. Because of this, 61% of CEO investment is now focused on reinventing – rather than maintaining – their current business.

The root of the ‘permacrisis’ – perma-change

Faced with balancing endless requests to reduce their costs with the need to advance their digitisation and transformation efforts, business leaders have one thing in common: they desperately need a new tactic. Whatever the crisis, decision-makers must stop reacting to it as it unfolds. Relying on gut feeling is no longer an option.

Regardless of the industry, it’s time to start thinking about and predicting the next crisis before it happens and be prepared for it. Ultimately, the numerous crises business leaders face from a deeper issue – the inability to see a challenge coming and an inability to react effectively to that challenge at pace.

Companies don’t need a crystal ball to plan for the future, just the right strategy. Forward-thinking business leaders are turning to accurate, real-time, data-driven insights to ensure they can plan rather than react and make crucial decisions at speed.

If you examine the most profitable companies in the world, their USP isn’t property, real estate, or cash reserves; it’s their ability to collect, analyse and act on their data at scale to make more effective decisions. Furthermore, these analytically mature organisations have created an internal structure and culture that encourages the communication of this data with everyone, ensuring that more people are involved in the decision intelligence process.

Analytically mature organisations have created an internal structure that encourages the communication of this data with everyone

In their annual CEO survey, PwC highlights the importance of this approach: “At the heart of every change is the need for human insight and experience combined with an understanding of the role technology plays in delivering the right results at speed and scale.”

Cash reserves property portfolios aren’t the cause of success, but they can be a hallmark of it. Instead, the root cause of success is the ability to predict, adapt, to change direction and strategy quickly and effectively to meet market demand or disruption. It’s the equivalent of turning a ship to face an oncoming wave versus being hit side-on and capsizing.

With huge volumes of data available to businesses today – from an ever-increasing number of sources – leaders have an opportunity to restructure their decision-making ability around effective and accessible decision-intelligence strategies.

Entering the cloud era: data for businesses

Data is essential to framing and guiding business decisions, but many organisations today are still failing to put data in the hands of decision-makers. While a McKinsey study estimates that managers in a large company waste the equivalent of 500,000 workdays a year making ineffective decisions, cloud analytics technologies can change that.

Cloud analytics technologies provide the power and flexibility to optimize decision-making processes based on real-time insights, which are essential in today’s rapidly changing environment. Cloud-based analytics has become a business imperative for thriving in 2023.

According to Alteryx’s global 2023 State of Cloud Analytics Report, four out of five respondents expect cloud analytics to have a positive impact during economic uncertainty, and nearly 90% agreed that cloud analytics have helped them become more profitable.

Gartner analyst report that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute on their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies.

The sheer amount of data available means companies struggle to convert it into meaningful decision intelligence. Long-term success requires the ability to mine company data for trends and insights at speeds needed to make challenging decisions. The cloud is the most effective way to store, access, and analyze large volumes of data at speed and scale.

At a time when business leaders need to be able to react and adapt faster than ever, the cloud allows them to easily experiment with different sources, tools, and models, whereas physical infrastructures offer much less flexibility.

Operating in the cloud also allows different teams to collaborate in real-time, enabling critical data and analytics to be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The cloud breaks down technical barriers, breaks down silos, and accelerates the transformation of companies and their businesses.

The aviation industry provides a compelling example of the power of analytics

Today, many airline companies have integrated advanced analytics solutions to better understand and analyse many parts of their operations – from passenger flow to fuel demand and crew scheduling.

Once data has been identified, gathered, processed, and analysed, it can be used to streamline day-to-day operations, automate manual processes, and improve the customer experience. For instance, one major US airline leveraged data-driven insights to enhance on-time performance, forecast fuel demand, improve flight demand predictions, and manage flight crew availability.

Thanks to these data-driven insights, the airline was better able to anticipate changes and increase fuel forecasting accuracy by 70%, leading to cost savings in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Data-driven insights helped to increase fuel forecasting accuracy by 70%

These insights were generated by collecting data from across departments, such as HR staff information, inventory reports and aircraft maintenance information. Combined, these insights delivered benefits far greater than the sum of its parts.

But while analytics can provide the insights needed to power business decisions, and cloud solutions provide access to data, how can businesses cope with the sheer volume of data generated by day-to-day operations? The first step is to bring the right people together on one application to give the context to the data and make the insights meaningful.

Accessible insights in the 21st century

Creating business intelligence was once the exclusive domain of data scientists and programmers – people who were able to write complex code from scratch. But analytics is cross-functional by nature.

Successful analytics initiatives typically require input and collaboration across technical experts, data experts, and domain experts.

At the turn of the millennium, any analytics would require requests for data scientists and IT teams to source data from disparate systems (that may or may not have been interoperable), normalise it, clean it, and output into a useful output.

The challenge there is clear – with such a high skills barrier to entry, how many data scientists were also fully versed in the myriad niche business challenges they were expected to help solve?

The missing link in this case is often in-domain expertise and collaboration. Cloud analytics brings together the line of business users – those best positioned to extract gold from analytics with their domain expertise, which will provide serious benefits to organizations – with the data experts and business leaders.

While not every worker needs to become a data scientist, any worker can now work with data and use their own experience to ask the right questions. Cloud analytics puts the power of data-driven decision-making into the hands of the domain expert. It is also an effective way to get around the talent shortage that is currently plaguing businesses.

There is tremendous value in democratising solutions that are accessible and easy to use – allowing everyone to participate in solving business problems. Because no matter how much data you have, it’s useless unless it can be accessed by the right people.

Cloud analytics enable companies to democratise data and analytics across the workforce so that employees can make more and better decisions even faster – and this is being driven by the growing business need for intelligence.

For business leaders to truly leverage the decision intelligence that can come from effective in-cloud analytics, it is vital to adopt a whole-business approach to generating data-driven insights.

The work involved in making these changes will ensure the company is able to adapt, react, and change at the speed necessary in a global business environment defined by disruption.

This piece was written and provided by Jay Henderson, SVP product management at Alteryx.