What’s now becoming clear is the need to evolve and cope with the pace of change. Industry experts are encouraging retailers to use data to look at the next horizon and reimagine their business. The changes they implement today can better position them to take advantage of the higher intensity digital economy going forward.

We’re seeing that retailers are now asking themselves: “What can I do that will help me right now, but will also position me well long-term?” This will help them position themselves to win not only today, but also tomorrow.

Using a data strategy to drive business change

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Henry Crawford, Director at Redkite, who is currently leading their data change consultancy, and was formerly Head of Data and BI at Deliveroo, to understand exactly how they’re advising retailers about utilising their data as an asset.

Firstly, it would be great to hear more about your previous work at Deliveroo. How has this helped shape the guidance you now give to organisations trying to understand and utilise their data?

Five years ago, I set out a vision for Deliveroo to be the most data-driven company in the UK. Our strategy was to use data to provide the very best possible service for customers, riders, and restaurants. As Head of Data and Business Intelligence, I witnessed the reshaping of human experiences through the prevailing mega trends. The emergence of the smartphone and always-on data; heightened expectations for single-click and immediacy; and analogue business models making the digital leap through last-mile technology.

Now, as a Director at Redkite – the leading data change partner to data leaders – I spend my time helping Europe’s leading enterprise and hyper growth organisations to grapple with these continuing trends.

How does that experience of acting on mega trends for a young hyper-growth organisation compare to the disruption we have seen across all domains in 2020?

2020 has unveiled the next normal. A few months in, we are now glimpsing the new mega trends that are poised to be as transformative in the 2020s as those we witnessed over the past decade.

As you say, we are indeed in a time of huge transformation. How do companies now position themselves for success in the so-called new normal?

The closure of brick-and-mortar stores has driven a shift into digital channels: e-Commerce, apps, video, and social. Every retailer and consumer services company I speak with is experiencing a similar pattern. “Digital customer engagement and sales are up by 700 percent” said one CEO. Everything we see tells us that human behaviour is being rewired permanently.

For any organisation to thrive in this new environment, they must ensure that each and every customer feels they are receiving a truly personalised experience.

I am sure this presents a challenge in a completely digital marketplace for many organisations?

The channel shift to digital represents a threat to the many firms that are not capturing an end-of-end view of customer behaviour. They cannot tailor customer interactions and create empathetic customer experiences. As Harris Poll research demonstrates, 63 percent of consumers expect personalisation as a standard of service, a proportion which can only increase as digital channels become more crowded  – yet few brands are achieving this consistently across all touchpoints.

Delivering a truly personalised customer experience is a huge undertaking. How would organisations begin to address that need for personalisation on an enterprise-level?

Personalised customer experiences can be readily achieved through modern customer data platform (CDP) technology such as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. We are seeing profound revenue, lifetime value (LTV) and margin benefits to those enterprise and hyper growth companies that embrace true personalisation. “Our understanding of the customer has flipped entirely – known behaviour is changing rapidly,” said a Transformation Director. Fractures are emerging between the in-work and the retired; the knowledge workers and the frontline; and the asset owners and experience renters. Each and every customer deserves to be understood and interacted with as an individual.

In your opinion, how can businesses pivot this unique set of challenges into future success?

The CFOs we speak with are expecting volatility to be a characteristic of the next normal. Indeed, leading CFOs embrace volatility as a source of competitive advantage. Those that stand to gain are the companies that have created end-to-end visibility of their supply chain and route-to-market; that have shifted from make-to-stock to make-to-order; and that are equipped to redeploy budgets, inventory, and focus towards the emergent sources of value.

With most businesses facing a scrambling of their supply chains and routes-to-market, there is an urgent need to understand product movement all the way through from raw material supplier to the ultimate consumer.

One consumer products company counted over a dozen strategic business priorities blocked on this visibility – all the way through from consumer demand forecasting, customer planning and trade investment optimisation; to key accounts management, availability, inventory optimisation and net revenue management.

How do enterprise organisations adapt and act quickly when traditionally, larger organisations can struggle with agile behaviours?

In my time at Deliveroo, we saw exponential growth. Revenues at over 650 percent per annum, expansion into dozens of new cities each quarter, and the onboarding of a wave of talent, globally. All of this was possible only because we embraced automation at every step.

Automation unlocks a compound benefit through lower operating costs, heightened data quality, reduced management burden, and faster cycle times. The winners in the next normal are those that shun business process outsourcing in favour of true business process automation – and so realise the unbeatable, compounding competitive advantage of strongest agility, quality, and understanding at lowest possible cost.

And finally, what do you see as the mega trends coming out of 2020?

In some respects, the mega trends shaping the next normal are not profoundly different from those of the recent past. What’s different is the velocity of change. The clock speed of business has sped up 10x, and we are now seeing executive teams bring forward their medium-term roadmaps at an unprecedented pace.

Subscription models. Personalisation. Next best action. Direct to consumer. Automation. Demand sensing. End-to-end planning. Made to order. Manufacturing execution. Control Towers… Digitalisation is now more important than ever and is enabling market leaders to move from surviving 2020 to winning in the next normal.

How a data strategy can help win in the next normal

Whoever you are, a modern data strategy will enable you to identify the business opportunities created by the next normal, the priority data and analytics assets that you will want to put in place, and the data operating model and roadmap that will unlock them. If you would like to explore this topic further, see our recent webinar series for information and materials shared on the topic, or contact Henry directly.

Find out more

Download the eBook: Four ways to maximise your business intelligence investments

Read more: Learn how to become data-driven

Register for the webinar series: Change with data

Tools to empower your development team

Read the blog: How to use a modern data warehouse solution to drive better business outcomes

Explore the learning path: Implement a data warehouse with Azure Synapse Analytics

Join a webinar: Transform your organisation from simply data-driven to insights-driven

About the author

Jodie is an Advanced Data and AI Specialist aligned specifically to our Retail and CPG customers across EMEA, helping to accelerate their digital transformation journey. She is passionate about the opportunities that technology creates through digital transformation, with data and analytics strategies playing a key role.

Starting her career with a Computer Science BSc Honours, Jodie has worked in a wide range of industries before joining Microsoft in 2017 as a Partner Technology Strategist and then most recently shaping the UK Azure Analytics Business & GTM strategy as the Analytics Product Marketing Manager.

Henry has spent the last decade using data to accelerate hyper growth companies. He built Deliveroo’s data and analytics function from scratch, growing the team from two to over 40 FTEs in 18 months. Henry holds a BSc in Physics from Imperial College, and a MSc in Nanotechnology from University College London.

The post How a modern data strategy can position your business for success in the new normal appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The opportunities created by digital transformation not only affect how businesses run but they also affect our lives as consumers. It doesn’t seem that long ago that on a Friday night, I’d head down to the local Blockbusters store to pick out a new film whereas now I don’t need to leave the comfort of my own home!

However, as organisations adapt to become more data-driven, there’s lots of challenges they must address on their journey. A recent Harvard Business Review’s report looked into why some analytic strategies fall short but others succeed. I’ll be delving into a few highlights from this report, as well as discussing where we’re seeing customer success with delivering insights at scale.

1.      Get the basics right

Global consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser who produces health, hygiene, and home products is one of many companies who are using technology to unlock the power of data and empower their employees to work smarter. Executives at Reckitt Benckiser are now seeing a direct link between business performance and decisions based on high-quality data.

Whilst the majority of business leaders agree that effective data and analytics strategies are essential for business transformation, success in this area is hard to achieve and organisations are struggling to become mature users of data and analytics.

If you’re expecting a quick journey to becoming data-driven, you’re likely to fail. You need to get the basics right. This is a process that must be continually modified based on changes in your markets, your business, and in technology.

2.      Unlock your data

Data silos and difficulties managing data from multiple new systems is often stated as the root cause of disappointing results. This is because siloed data locks information within individual departments and can block insights being generated by the wider organisation.

To enable a broader dissemination of information, these data siloes need to be eliminated. Organisations that leverage technologies like data warehouses to bring together data from different formats, sources, and applications can derive insights that are richer than from a single source.

Whilst going through their transformation, Reckitt Benckiser realised they needed to become more data-driven and unlock more than just their internal operational data. To get a holistic view of their business, they also needed third-party data from retailers and their competitors to understand their performance. More importantly, they needed it all to know what to do next.

To do this, they built a modern data warehouse solution to bring together a variety of data from different sources in Azure HDInsight and Azure SQL Data Warehouse (now Azure Synapse Analytics). They used Power BI to make the data easily accessible in one view across the organisation.

3.      Manage your data

The success for analytics really depends on the quality of your data. Data inaccuracies can be created in one department and then easily spread throughout an entire organisation.

Therefore, it’s important to invest in an effective framework for reliable data management which can address a range of tasks. This includes creating rules for sharing information across departments and monitoring the accuracy of new records to enable better data governance.

NEL support over 43 London clinical groups. They had a vision to improve their ability to predict health outcomes by using advanced analytics. To achieve this, they first had to create a system to better integrate and govern their data. Once they put this data management system in place, they enabled their customers to deliver personalised care and improve patient outcomes by making more accurate healthcare predictions.

“We’re giving the clinicians the intelligence to have an informed conversation that helps patients learn about their risk factors,” says Graham Crawford, NEL’s director of analytics.

4.      Turn insights into action

By investing in data management solutions, organisations put themselves into a better position to take advantage of advanced analytics. Technologies, such as machine learning and AI, support their decision making and turn insights into action.

UK insurer LV= needed a different way of doing business to support customers whose car accidents fall into the grey area of who’s at fault. Working with their data scientists and Microsoft Services, they implemented an Azure machine learning solution that reduced these grey area outcomes from 20 percent to 3.9 percent. As a result, they had better claim resolution outcomes and delivered better customer experiences.

5.      Build employees skills

Even if you invest in the latest analytics tools, to truly become a data-driven organisation you need to ensure your employees know how to utilise them. In order to take the best advantage of new technology, you need to invest in developing your employees. Help them gain new skills and adapt to the cultural change within your organisation.

As Bk Vasan, Executive Director of Data Engineering, Cloud and Advanced Analytics at T-Mobile correctly said: “the biggest opportunities with analytics come from enabling people to think differently based on the insights they’re getting from data.”

At Microsoft, we have heavily invested into skills for both out internal employees and our customers that you can take advantage of today. Find learning paths for Azure Data Engineers plus many more on Microsoft Learn here.

6.      Gain a competitive advantage

It’s very clear that analytics adds a competitive differentiator in most industries, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. The key to getting started is to get the basics right and then ‘land and expand’.

Identify two or three business goals, understand what data is needed to support these and then demonstrate quick wins that validate your analytics strategies. The actions generated from these insights are what then enables you to re-imagine how you engage with your customers, transform your products, optimise your operations, and enable your employees.

I look forward to seeing what’s next in 2030…

Find out more about becoming data-driven

Discover what makes a successful analytics strategy

How to use analytics in the cloud

About the author 

Jodie is Microsoft UK’s Cloud Scale Analytics and IoT Lead. She is passionate about the opportunities that technology creates through digital transformation, with data and analytics strategies playing a key role. Starting her career with a Computer Science BSc Honours, Jodie has worked in a wide range of industries from Space and Defence to Financial Services before joining Microsoft in 2017 as a Partner Technology Strategist for MSPs.

The post How to become data-driven: 6 steps to success appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.