Data is the key ingredient to your recipe to success
We are living in VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) times. Even if you haven’t heard about VUCA before, you experience it in your life every day, and so does your business.
Whatever your industry is, you need to adapt to growing Complexity, from technology landscape to globalization. At the same time, you must deal with rapid rate of change -Volatility-. For example, technology becomes obsolete much quicker and what happens at the other corner of the world impacts you in real time. Combine both and no wonder it is difficult to make predictions about the outcomes of your business decisions, from brands to position to technology to upskill yourself in.
Equally impactful are the Uncertainty, that is, our difficulty in understanding the current situation -from fake news to changes in regulation- and the Ambiguity, defined as the lack of clarity about the meaning of an event (do you remember your first impressions about Covid-19? If you had the clarity to understand its impact back in March 2020, you are totally my hero!). Put them together — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity- and sometimes we might feel like we don’t know where we are, and we don’t know where to go.
As VUCA is not new, there are good recipes we have learnt to apply to VUCA environments in the last years: setting your Vision and following your North Star is clearly one. This led to the Digital Transformation wave of the last decade, with customer experience, in most of the cases, at the heart of the vision. This recipe was good enough for many years when the VUCA was less significant. However, as VUCA grows, more and more companies realize there is too much to handle to sustain their Digital Transformation. Just defining a clear vision and having the flexibility to navigate the environment, it is no longer enough to reach your destination. You need a second ingredient: Data.
In VUCA times you need more than ever big data to understand where you are; you need real-time data, or as close to real-time as you can get it, to find out what is happening and why is happening; you need data -big and small- to get some (AI) help to make complex business decisions (what if scenarios, optimizations, predictions about your new products/ services/ markets/ costs…). You need meaningful, trustworthy data you can easily access and use to adapt, pivot and reinvent yourself at the speed of times, so that you can arrive to your destination… as the destination moves!
Take the example of this beverage company, a long-term Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft client. If we go back to pre-covid times, their north star was engaging with customers in more personalized ways and channels. They worked hard to reimagine their brands and portfolio and how to bring their experience beyond the supermarkets and stores to new spaces and situations, from owned bars to music festivals. Developing customer apps and building ecommerce platforms was part of the journey. Then, suddenly, the pandemic changed dramatically our behavior -from where we shop to brands we buy-. Their previous experience about the production needed for a certain week or event was not useful anymore to define the production of tomorrow and things like taking a flight to review their supply chain with a provider in the other corner of the world was not possible.
Even if these are critical questions that needed answers asap, beyond solving the problems of today, what our client really wanted to know was, which covid trends will stay? which ones will revert, get reinforced or disappear? is trust the important value to hold on to and should we focus on evergreen brands? And as VUCA grows, questions do not stop coming, just the opposite, today we have more and more complex questions than two years ago: Are healthy habits or sustainability still important (with small brands leading) or because of the cost of the raw materials and the energy -unexpectedly skyrocketing again — are white labels more important? Which providers can we use tomorrow considering the Ukraine war impact?
Nobody had all the answers two years ago, but if you have worked like our beverage client to collect, curate, enrich, analyze and make available your data, you are for sure better equipped to provide the best possible answers and bring the best business outcomes. For example, our client has already revenues above their pre-covid numbers and is equipped to adjust to higher production costs.
Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft, have been accompanying clients in their journey with data for many years now and we are so happy to see them navigate VUCA times with the power of data, well ahead of competitors. Take my word or you can check what Gartner is saying about us.
Wherever you are in your data-led transformation, well advanced as some of our clients or just starting your journey, in this series of blogs, we want to share with you some of the well proven, successful data receipts we’ve helped our clients implement in their industries. And you can take my word here: they are thriving in our VUCA world. Stay tuned for Part 2 of our blog series, where we’ll discuss why placing data at the center of your business’ transformation is key to creating enduring success.
