Organizations are jumping on the big data bandwagon—but all too often, the driver is performance and the platform. Even though both are important, starting there is like putting the cart before the horse. It can leave you scurrying to find business initiatives to justify your platform investment and ongoing funding.
The value in big data is what your business can do with it—you can distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack by becoming an intelligent enterprise through transformation and innovation. To do this, you need to anticipate market trends and ideally, create them. The new analytics world is not your father’s business intelligence world that consisted of reporting historical data. No, the new analytics world is forward looking and real-time—it involves social media, predictive modeling, and telematics.
Innovation requires a business vision that is enabled by technology. It also takes the use of transforming skills to create your own Art of the Possible. Creating this vision means defining truly compelling use cases that match your core capabilities to timely market opportunities.
Innovate with Design Thinking
One way to create this vision is with “Design Thinking”, an approach that is empathetic and places you in your customer’s shoes. This involves brainstorming market and product opportunities by assuming a customer persona. In this way, you can identify with customer pains and brainstorm new approaches to products, solutions, and actions in order to solve those pains.
After going through this process, you’ll be ready to prioritize potential solutions, establish market potential and value, and evaluate your current capabilities and gaps. From there, you can determine which existing capabilities will suffice, which ones need enhancement, and which ones will need to be developed.
As you build your solutions and applications, you can also start to drive true self-service analytics by engaging employees in data exploration and predictive thinking, as well, for ongoing continuous improvement.
The greatest benefit of this approach is that you begin to transform everyone’s mindset to an innovative one that is truly customer driven.
