While data analytics has been important for a great number of years to different business units of organisations, the explosion in connected devices and applications continues to generate an exponential growth in data and the need to get better insights from “big data” in business enterprises.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), since 2012, the global ICT industry has since shifted to its third major platform of growth - built on mobile, cloud, social, and big data away from mainframe computers and PCs.
The explosion of information collected through these various emerging IT platforms in the world has resulted into enormous amount of structured and unstructured data within organization walls, a phenomenon referred to as “big data”
Since big data is just a haystack of information, the question is how organisations can find value in it, which is realised only through analysing this data using data analytics tools. Without data analytics, these silos of information are useless to an organization.
Imagine driving a car without a dashboard, the driver will exceed the required speed, he/she will not know whether there is a problem with the car battery, or running low on fuel.
This is exactly what a lot of CEOs who manage their companies without having some sort of visual way of understanding in real time what is going on in their business operations.
These CEOs then rely on several internal management meetings and applied research carried out by interns or expensive contracted external research companies to know what is going on within their organisations and the macro environment, for instance customer and brand sentiment analysis. In this information age, the turnaround time between commissioning a research and acting on its results is too high to offer the business any advantage over its competitors.
By investing in big data analytic tools, leaders have ready access to a real time central repository of information to facilitate faster and effective decision-making. Secondly, big data analytics creates transparency to business stakeholders like shareholders and global investors who would want a little insight on the performance of the business.
This however does not only apply to private sector enterprises but also public enterprises.
From a government perspective, data analytics transforms a government from existing as a transactional government where it invests in transactional systems to an integrated government where it collects and links its system to other functions in various departments.
From this point, the government is optimised and tries to cut costs involved in serving the citizens then finally achieves transparency where citizens are able to see what it does with the funds they collect.
This kind of transparency spans to listed companies at the stock exchange. Typically being able to publish quarterly reports, current activities and performance are key priorities investors are concerned with. Any external investor willing to invest in a Kenyan company will not touch it if its books are not in order, if that company does not have transparent information and if its senior management lacks insight and foresight of the company’s operations and market performance.
These are key things that differentiate and create a need for data analytics in the East African market.
The challenge in today’s businesses enterprises is to make data they collect useful. This is done by putting the right information into the hands of the right employees to drive informed, forward-thinking decisions that will drive business opportunities. Identification of the right data from big data through the use of data analytics tools is inevitable in the current market.
