Yes, analytics, data science and AI/ML are the rage. And actionable insights are the El Dorado, where the proverbial treasure will manifest in big savings, bigger revenues and of course, customer delight.
But advances in analytics are struggling to keep up with the speed of business. How can you upgrade quickly enough and, more importantly, how do you upskill entire teams in keeping with the pace of technological change? This has become the talk of the “advanced analytics” town. Want your company to see a rise in profits? Upskill. Want your team to deliver that new, updated and sought-after service line? Once again, upskill.
This is anything but easy. But it can be made simple. Let’s look at some of the challenges and solutions for enterprises today.
And just sending your teams for mandatory product training is not enough. You need focused and continuous coaching – technical, functional and even behavioral. A culture focused on customer experience is what every analytics team needs. And let’s not forget the tough balance between training and forecasting. Hire more people, and you have resources waiting for challenging work to do. Hire fewer, and your project suffers.
Modernizing your tech in terms of building analytics capability is not easy given the needs around quality, quantity and variety of skills needed. Add to that the talent shortage, especially in key markets like India and North America. The skills are there, but a booming market makes the employer’s job tough.
Let us start with the storage conundrum. How much is enough, really?
As cloud-based storage models become the norm, an enterprise must spend greater and greater percentages of its tech budget on cloud space. It needs storage not only for servicing the customer but also for training its teams.
A joke in the technology world is that real stress is not when you get the office rental invoice or on employee payday but when you get the cloud service provider (CSP) bill. Cloud spend can hit the company hard!
We often hear clients test the theory that dashboards and servers are dead. They want real-time self-serve analytics. This means a complete shift to predictive analytics, lots of real-time actionable insights and less costs. Right?
Wrong!
Even if servers are dead, serverless technology and cloud aren’t exactly cheap. And dashboards are not really dead. Predictive analytics is the future (pun intended), prescriptive analytics is the present. But descriptive analytics (and hence dashboards) is still alive and well in many companies.
As much as we want to bid goodbye to servers and dashboards and move on to real-time computing, companies must first turn insights into actions. This means giving up storage and depending only on real-time inputs and insights. Is your company ready to do that? Very few are.
There are no “one size fits all” solutions to this upskilling and upgrading challenge. ISG has some basic guidelines for clients and service providers alike to address this.
Want to discuss the latest trends around upskilling or upgrading in analytics? Or want to discuss a specific challenge in this space? We are always up for a chat. Reach out to us here.