Digital transformation for everyone: how Gyana is democratising analytics
The unprecedented explosion in computing power and global interconnectedness that has taken place over the course of the last few decades has led to a wide array of structural changes in the way that companies operate. A key component of this development has been the advent of digital transformation — the use of new technologies like machine learning and analytics to boost efficiency and productivity, as well as to enhance the customer experience.
Accordingly, managers and IT specialists seeking to leverage artificial intelligence and big data face the steep challenge of having to create solutions for the digital age. These solutions are costly to develop (often prohibitively so, in the case of a small business) both in terms of human and of financial capital. What are the problems that stand in the way of businesses trying to modernise?
Challenges
1) High costs. Analytics programs are difficult and expensive to develop in-house. Many traditional SMEs still don’t even have websites, let alone the technical know-how to put together bespoke digital solutions. Even larger businesses with large IT divisions tend to struggle, as they lack the means by which to collect and analyse customer data. Matters are complicated by the presence of ‘analytics translators’ — intermediaries that interpret the raw data generated by the program and explain it to management. Furthermore, analytics programs are extremely difficult to scale — a recent McKinsey survey revealed that only 8% of 1000 respondents have been able to do so efficiently. As a result, many companies hire consultants to carry out this work for them. Unfortunately, consultancy is expensive and tends to produce data that is already out of date by the time a report is compiled.
2) Internal resistance to change. Digital transformation requires significant cultural overhaul within businesses. Resistance can come at every level of management — from team leaders resentful of increased internal scrutiny to executives unwilling to stake their careers on an expensive and potentially risky reorganisation effort. Board members in particular tend to be older and more conservatively-minded, particularly in businesses where the potential gains from digital transformation are less obvious. In order to create institutional buy-in, projects like analytics programs need to demonstrate clear returns relatively quickly. This is not always possible with in-house solutions or consultancy, which can take a long time to deliver results.
3) Institutional blindness to weak points. The issue of board conservatism discussed above has a further implication: companies sometimes lack understanding of where their weak points lie, thus making management unwilling to invest in a costly digital transformation project that could correct for these weaknesses. Note that this is a self-perpetuating problem: the insights that could have been provided by a robust analytics program would have demonstrated the necessity of developing the program in the first place. Digital transformation is a series of mutually complementary processes: an analytics program can reveal information about an enterprise’s customers which is then used to finetune an online advertising campaign. Efficiency gains derived from analytics are multiplicative, not additive.
The consequence of this is that only a small proportion of the possible gains from analytics and other aspects of digital transformation have been realised — perhaps as little as 10% in some sectors. Furthermore, the lion’s share of this increased efficiency has gone to larger and more established players who were first in the door. Smaller enterprises, particularly in digitally-conscious industries like retail, are increasingly at risk of being pushed out by their richer competitors.
Democratising analytics
Gyana provides a solution for all three problems outlined above. We have made it possible for businesses to reap the rewards of an advanced analytics program for a fraction of the cost of developing it in-house or hiring a consultancy. Unlike consultancy reports, our data is updated in near real-time, so that our clients receive a dynamically evolving picture of their business landscape, rather than a static snapshot.
Moreover, with over 65 global data providers, we have access to much more information than a business would be able to gather on its own. The interface is designed to be intuitive and easily accessible by a user with limited technical knowledge, making it easy to explain the insights to management and boardrooms, without the need for analytics translators. Our findings can be used to identify the areas in which digital transformation will provide the greatest gains in efficiency. Most importantly, this is a solution for all businesses, not just for those with the deepest pockets.
Although the challenges facing businesses seeking to undergo digital transformation are legion, we firmly believe that every company can stand to profit from harnessing the power of analytics. According to the Harvard Business Review, 70% of executives at large companies report that they have derived value from AI and big data. A separate study by Accenture reported that 83% of executives have pursued big data projects to secure a competitive edge. What we are witnessing is a fundamental reorganisation in the structure of human labour on a scale unseen since the Industrial Revolution. The future of business is digital. Let’s make sure that everyone can benefit.
