About a decade ago, most consumers had to scramble through a pile of DVDs for the ‘perfect’ movie, or repeatedly change the radio station, looking for that catchy new song. But thanks to businesses like Netflix and Spotify, such experiences are rarities these days. Netflix vs. Blockbuster, Uber vs. Taxicab and Spotify vs. Tower Records—how did the winners gain the competitive edge?
Businesses like Spotify, Uber and Netflix have recognized that data has become the real currency in the digital economy. They harness the power of data to customize customer experiences and predict needs. Data has become fundamental to their decision-making and strategy, allowing them to stay ahead of competition and top-of-mind for their customers. These new players have managed to understand today’s customers and successfully launched never-heard-of-before business models, changing their industries forever.
Why are so many companies data-rich, yet insight-poor?
McKinsey pundits concur that having a data culture is absolutely essential to continued success. With the right amount of harnessed data, businesses can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer away from risky outcomes.
But modern companies are overwhelmed by an unprecedented amount of data, and more is arriving every day, with no signs of slowing down.
IDC recently published a report on the ever-growing datasphere, what it calls the collective world’s data, and the numbers are staggering. IDC predicts that the collective sum of the world’s data will grow from 33 zettabytes this year to a 175ZB by 2025, for a compounded annual growth rate of 61%. It’s difficult to grasp 175ZB of data, but David Reinsel, Senior Vice President at IDC, explains in this video. “If one were able to store 175ZB onto Blu-ray discs, then you’d have a stack of discs that can get you to the moon 23 times,” Reinsel says. Holy cow, now that’s a lot of data!
Clearly, with so much data, organizations must deploy innovative approaches to data integration. But the influx of information is so voluminous and complex that traditional data analytic systems are ill-equipped to handle it.
It’s all about holistic information management
While industry pundits agree that data is the currency of tomorrow, it’s not just enough to have vast amounts of data—you need to understand it and use it contextually. Proper data integration allows companies to make data-driven decisions and strategies, transforming performance. Companies who aren’t collecting and using data appropriately face an impossible hurdle in the race for innovation and competitiveness. Without access to hyper-relevant data for decision making, companies will quickly become isolated and disconnected, experts indicate.
Ultimately, relevant data will deliver an engaged customer experience. Combined with analytics, this data can empower companies with appropriate insight and delivering more engaged customers, reduced churn, improved supply chain efficiency and costs, and even higher employee satisfaction.
But without end-to-end visibility into various data flows, managers cannot detect errors within business operations or in data coming from trading partners companies are unable to harness the full power of data.
“The modern digital economy demands more from businesses. New models of trade, information exchange, and global collaboration are up-ending the ways that we think about business processes and systems,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO & CTO of OpenText. “Competitive advantage in this new API and data-enabled economy comes through technical sophistication, but also agility, flexible governance models, and improved integration of business-critical information and services.”
When evaluating integration strategies, consider how a lack of visibility could be affecting your business:
- How easy is it to track the health and status of your business processes that involve multiple applications or trading partners?
- Do decision makers have to access multiple systems to get a complete picture of process flows and breakdowns?
- How much time do you spend manually putting together reports with data from multiple applications or data sources?
- What are some immediate business challenges you could address if you had better insights into your data and processes?
- What keeps you from fully leveraging the data you have in your organization?
Deploying proven technology to achieve tangible business outcomes
OpenText™ Lens™ is a powerful cloud application that provides visibility into data flows between enterprise applications, customers, suppliers and partners. Whether monitoring business process health against KPIs or managing timely responses to electronic orders received from customers, Lens enables end-to-end visibility into all your data-driven business processes. Effectively, business leaders can drive operational excellence, enhance customer service and access unified data for strategic planning.
What’s more exciting, Lens now comes with enhanced capabilities, so business leaders remain in full control and deliver an engaged customer experience, consistently.
You can read more in our press release.
How do I become “The Resilient Organization”? By deploying future-proof technology. Visit our website to learn more.
