1. Strategic Initiatives
According to McKinsey, it's time to bring analytics
into the realm of business strategy.
In their article, "The strategy-analytics revolution",
they suggest advanced analytics can provide new
strategic insights that can be used to accomplish
the following:
Reduce Bias In Decisions
Based on their own experience, many planners tend
to take an "inside view" of project costs, timelines,
and outcomes. This often results in an overly
optimistic approach and projects that are doomed
to failure. Today, planners can use real-world case
data and advanced analytics to provide an "outside
view" to a business strategy. This enables staff to
better estimate the chances of success for that
strategy before allocating precious resources.
Unearth New Growth Opportunities
It doesn't matter whether a strategic focus is on the
development of new products, identifying new
market segments or seeking acquisitions targets.
Many growth opportunities are just hard to spot. By
mining a myriad of data sources (both structured
and unstructured), advanced analytics can
effectively augment and enhance traditional
brainstorming methods to uncover hidden growth
opportunities.
Identify Early-Stage Trends
Trends come and go. But the ability to identify a
trend early on can have tremendous impact on
business initiatives. Advanced analytics can comb
through millions (if not billions) of real-time data
and extract valuable patterns that can help identify
emerging trends. It can provide the impetus to jump
on an opportunity -- before your competitors do.
LEVERAGING DATA | 3
