CEO of data analytics firm Quantexa shares how digital resilience and data-driven decision-making will determine which businesses thrive in a post-Covid world
Quantexa
- Vishal Marria is the CEO of Quantexa, an anti-fraud firm harnessing AI to crack down on money laundering and improve decision-making.
- Marria shares how digital resilience and data-driven decision making will determine which businesses thrive in a post-COVID-19 world.
- Because of his work, Business Insider named Marria to our annual list of the 10 leaders transforming enterprise tech in Europe.
- Visit Business Insider's Transforming Business homepage for more stories.
It's no secret that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a significant missed opportunity in enterprise data and analytics. In fact, at least three-quarters of companies today have limited their use of analytics and fail to capitalize on the operational decision-making opportunity of modern data intelligence. Organizations often struggle to operationalize analytics into the day-to-day business. However, businesses have begun to realize that state-of-the-art decision intelligence requires a blend of machine intelligence with human intelligence to ensure optimal decision-making. Applying graph representations to high performance data sets is fast becoming an imperative to modern decision-making success.
Digital resilience is the new watchword in a post-COVID-19 world
The ability to respond and adapt quickly to new situations has never been more stark than during the pandemic. The crisis has taught organizations that a new level of agility and digital resilience is needed across ecosystems, partners and the supply chain. The focus for any would-be intelligent enterprise should evolve the capabilities created to manage the impact of Covid-19 into productive analytics hubs, capable of using leading indicators to predict and react to future risk with greater frequency, while simultaneously discovering hidden future opportunities. Those that fail to implement an effective enterprise data model enabling the foundation for resilient decision-making by 2021 are forecasted to underperform on profitability by 10% according to IDC.
Data at the core - but how can you trust it?
The volume of data being created is quickly surpassing the rate at which computing and storage systems are being developed. According to IDC, the amount of data available will be enough to fully occupy a stack of tablets measuring 6.6 times the distance between the moon and the earth by the end of this year. The point is, both external and internal data are growing at such a rate, 26% year over year, that ensuring data is available in a meaningful, operationalized way is becoming more important as a core discipline. By definition, the volume, velocity and variety of big data is creating huge operational pressure - called the data-decision gap.
According to KPMG, 56% of CEOs don't trust the integrity of their data. That said, when the analytical models and technology they use to guide decision-making work with untrustworthy data, they naturally doubt its recommendations. It's become important to understand the context of your data so you can reveal the unseen and, in some cases, unexpected connections that either create risk or opportunity.
A new generation of intelligent decision-making
The lack of a single, trusted view of data across an organization is a serious obstacle to data-driven decision intelligence. Without this, decisions can't be automated in an accurate or efficient way, and individual entities such as customers and transactions, cannot be properly and fully understood and analyzed. However, reliable data integration, especially at scale, is difficult, which is why data becomes stuck in multiple silos - inhibiting the connected single view and holistic, contextual analysis that is desired. Traditional rules-based approaches to decision support are not sufficiently agile or resilient in today's uncertain and rapidly changing business and geopolitical environment - advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI are needed to empower users or automate key processes.
The good news is that new approaches and innovations to data and analytics show a path forward for maximizing the value enterprises can get from their data.
Entity resolution and network generation, surfaced through graph analytics, are key to understanding relationships and behaviors of customers and third parties in the supply chain, resulting in better, faster operational decisions. By integrating the right data, decision makers can become empowered as their new insights come from finding explainable links between fully understood, trusted data in a single view provided by entity resolution.
Machine learning to deliver big, but not without human input
Less than 15% of analytics adopters have made progress with automated decisions. This is a big problem, especially when dealing with large complex data sets. Deployment of fully automated operational decision-making moves analytics from reactive reporting to active, intelligent, and real-time decision-making. As more tasks are automated, the enterprise can focus more on differentiating work.
The key to this is augmentation - combining the best of human and machine intelligence. This allows repeatable routines of work to be fully automated and exceptional cases requiring fine judgement to be dealt with by humans. A great benefit of augmented analytics is that it accelerates the formulation of new data and analytics capabilities which, in effect, can be adapted to the skills, needs and problems of different classes of business user, which extends the reach of analytics across an organization. By maximizing the value of human and machine intelligence, there is a clear path to creating an effective data-driven enterprise.
Organization implications - creating the ability to adapt
To shift to a data-driven enterprise, business leaders need to reimagine how they operationalize the data they consume and analyze. The key to this is gaining a trusted, contextual, connected single view of the vast amounts of data that now exist for better decision-making.
Analytics now drives today's enterprise, from formation of business strategy to powering operational excellence. Creating a culture of collaboration and getting the best out of humans alongside machines is crucial. Analytics has clearly moved from being an optional extra to serving as the core of decision-making, so creating a data-centric contextual decision intelligence framework has never been more important.
The C-suite and all business leaders need to spearhead a change across the enterprise to help drive adoption and utilization of advanced analytics. Before the pandemic, data and analytics were already the new competitive differentiators. But now, creating the right level of digital resilience across an organization that can adapt and change quickly in response to external pressure and threats will set the foundation for the enterprises that ultimately survive and thrive. The key questions we should all be asking ourselves are how well do we trust the data that we use to make decisions? And how can organizations implement decision intelligence to ensure future sustainability and growth?
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