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Building Business Resilience through Data Centricity
Building Business Resilience through Data Centricity

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The ongoing pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation that was underway since the advent of the internet. Customers (or guests as they are known at Target), have benefitted from the options & convenience available to them at the click of a button! The implication of this convenience is both an increase in data snippets of the customers’ shopping journey, but, paradoxically, also, a reduction in interactions with the people behind the business.

Just think about the last time you stopped by in the store to discuss choices, preferences etc. with the store keeper?  Such personal interactions are a rarity online. But, if you know where and how to look, you will find a wealth of insights. Be it, search and browse patterns, or reviews and comments in a product detail page, or product recommendations. Success in this form of business will favor those who listen and learn from such digital signals.

If you want to embark on this journey, be sure to dust off your rolodex and call your data scientist friends! You will need them to help find the signals, make sense of it, and see the intricacies and probabilities. They will simplify and tell the incredibly complex stories, with hopefully the same aplomb as David Attenborough when he helps us see the ‘wild’ life!

You will also need to build a foundation to use data in a way that helps the business. Here are some of the things you can do:

First, and foremost, instil a data-driven culture. Every individual in the company will play a critical part in building a data-driven culture! They will either be creators of high-quality data, or, be consumers of data. More often than not – nearly everyone will be both creators and consumers. Hence building this culture will need to take place both top-down and bottoms-up.

The top-down approach is how the leadership will let the entire company know that Data is a critical asset. This will set the tone and instil the importance of insights and decisions based on data

The bottom-up piece is where every individual helps in identifying the right data points that their processes or interactions are generating, which they will  report to the company’s leadership

Enable data discovery with trust : Once you have data, you need to have an ability to locate and trust it. It is fair to expect that with wide variety of data sources and large volumes of data generated, trust will be a casualty. To visualize this, think of an analogy like corporate policies. What if there were many stale copies of the policy lying around with everyone quoting their ‘version’  without a central authorised version to validate with!

It is, therefore, critical to invest in systems that enable data trust. It helps improve availability and traceability of data – this will be critical, especially when data is used to make business decisions!

Keep your guests (customer) at the center. As you develop your data strategy, keep the interests of the guest at the center! This way, the data you capture, measure and analyze will provide you signals of the interactions your customers have with your systems. It helps build products & services and make quick changes in a way that benefits them. It also provides great insights on the quality of interactions of your guests with your company team members. 

Complement data insights with contextual information. While data can provide a lot of insights about guest behavior, these insights work best when they are consumed in conjunction with the intuitive feel of the businessperson. Data by itself doesn’t do much often, without the human in the loop. The pandemic has been the best teacher on this.

Here is an example – Think about retail, and the purchase pattern in the early days of the pandemic. Most of the purchase then was focused on essentials preparing for the impending lockdowns. Now fast forward to today. The pandemic hasn’t gone away, but it is very unlikely that the purchasing pattern this year will be exactly similar to what we saw last year. Thus, a savvy business person will moderate sourcing based on historical data.  

As I conclude, I must say, while most of the examples discussed in this blog are in the specific area of retail, every business will have their own rich stories. It is fair to say that data  will become more and more central to the decision making abilities of a business and will give it the best chance to respond to unprecedented situations.

Dr. Gorur Shrinivas, Vice President, Data Sciences, Target in India
Dr. Gorur Shrinivas
Vice President, Data Sciences, Target in India

 


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