Transformational D&A Initiatives You MUST Get Done in 2023

In today’s business landscape, data is the key which separates thriving companies from those falling by the wayside. Whether it is rapidly redesigning products & services to the new realities, closing talent supply-demand gaps, or resetting operational costs based on zero-based budgets – businesses & executives need the ability to make the right decisions at the right time with the right stakeholders.

Despite increasing investments in D&A capabilities to support such needs, a 2023 D&A Leadership Executive survey highlights the gap between the worlds of business & analytics where the overly optimistic assessment from leaders executing D&A initiatives (98% say D&A is providing value) does not match with the progress reported on longer-term initiatives such as driving business innovation with data (only 59.5% say yes), and, creating a data-driven organization (only 23.9% say yes).

So, if you are responsible for D&A capabilities, it can be difficult to separate what are the real, transformational initiatives capable of revolutionizing your business from the ‘noise’ of so many new technologies and trends promising ‘faster and more accurate access to insights.’ Using our experience supporting & guiding leaders at multiple levels, I help you cut through the noise to focus your limited time, effort & resources on the areas that will be most impactful to the goal of using D&A to drive business growth in 2023.

1. Embrace managed AI to realize the promise of AI for your business.

   McKinsey – who expects a $10T+ return from AI – rightly identifies, success remains elusive for many businesses, with 72% not yet able to take advantage, while an astonishing 85% presently fail to realize any sort of business benefit from their attempts at integrating AI into existing operations! If majority of the AI projects fail, organizations must invest in failing fast. In other words, you must be able to identify the use cases that will achieve specific business outcomes & are feasible & do it in days not months. Rather than DIY, you should consider fully managed AI solutions for business such as Infocepts’ AI as a Service (AIaaS).

2. Revisit resource allocation models for your D&A projects to get more done with less.

   Companies are facing financial crunch because of on-going economic uncertainty including the very real possibility of a recession in the next 12-18 months. Data shows that companies that come out strong after a recession – i.e., with twice the industry averages in revenue & profits – are proactive in preparing & executing against multiple scenarios backed by insights. They re-deploy employees against the highest value activities in their strategy, weigh trade-offs & take deliberate risks, but without cutting corners on critical projects. You should a) stop paying for legacy technology maintenance, b) fix your broken managed services model, & c) choose on-demand talent.

3. Help your teams ‘actually’ use your D&A capabilities to increase adoption & realize business value.

   Many organizations have invested in specialized teams for delivering data. But the real value from data comes only when your employees use it. Data fluency is an organizational capability that enables every employee to understand, access, and apply data as fluently as one can speak in their language. With more fluent people in an organization, productivity increases, turnover reduces, and innovation thrives without relying only on specialized teams. Top roadblocks according to industry surveys include lack of trust in organizational data and lack of data skills in employees. You should a) assess your organizational fluency, b) establish a data concierge, & c) introduce interventions to strengthen access, trust, and adoption.

4. Inverse your team’s thinking in 3 (counterintuitive) ways to be more responsive to your business needs.

   Large enterprises have multi-year roadmaps to advance their transformative D&A capabilities to include modernizing existing platforms, retiring legacy ones, or building new applications for business. A proven approach is centred around building a business-driven roadmap, using a modular foundational architecture, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and allocating necessary talent for success. It sounds simple, but the execution is fraught with challenges.

   Patterns such as agile, data mesh, data fabric, and delta lake guide IT leaders for dealing with them, but there are 3 antipatterns in how work is managed that slow organizations down. You are likely experiencing them! If so, you should a) design work for outcomes, not functions, b) choose products over projects, & c) choose teams over staffing. These tactics will increase flexibility in your roadmap execution, responsiveness to your business needs, and effectiveness of your teams.

5. Reimagine how you bring value to business – move fast with Solutions as a Service!

   Salesforce and Amazon pioneered commercially successful IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models in cloud computing that gradually shifted significant portions of responsibility for bringing value from the client to the service provider. The benefits of agility, elasticity, economies of scale, and reach are well known. Since then, countless products have emerged in these 3 categories. But they are limiting & constrain clients from going one step further towards productized services, what we call, Solutions as a Service!

   You must combine products, problem solving & expertise together in one easy to use solution. This is inevitable given the sheer pace at which technology is evolving. This new category requires a shift in thinking and will give you a source of advantage like how the early cloud adopters received during the last decade. Infocepts offers many domain-driven solutions in this category to include data products such as e360 for people analytics and AutoMate for business automations.

Moving forward from ideas to actions

D&A leadership will be challenged like never before in 2023. You can either keep doing more of the same, or take a step back, reflect, and lean-in on new & better ways to move forward on your D&A initiatives. To learn more about the transformational D&A initiatives that you must get done, download our advisory note for the full analysis, examples, and recommendations.