Data grows business insight and power

Put away your crystal ball – when it comes to revealing hidden patterns and predicting the future of your company, market or industry, decision-making solutions have taken over.

As Elaine Graydon, Chief Customer Officer of AtoBI, puts it: ‘‘Data reveals the unknown.’’

AtoBI is a business solutions consultancy that gives you the insight and power you need to strengthen and grow your business. While it has partnerships with numerous leading software vendors, AtoBI’s approach is always to start with the problem that the customer wants to solve.

‘‘Sometimes a customer will come to us and give us a list of what they want us to create,’’ Graydon says.

‘‘But we ask them, ‘What are you trying to achieve? What questions are you trying to answer?’

‘‘Some people just want an Excel sheet so they can see their numbers and know they are hitting their targets.

‘‘But BI has come to be more about getting insights and supporting business decisions.’’

Graydon cites the case of a healthcare organisation where AtoBI was able to take a snapshot of surgeons, theatre utilisation and other factors, and ‘‘show where the gaps opened up’’.

‘‘If a number of people had the same procedure with a range of different surgeons, but the recovery rate for one surgeon’s patients was two days better than for the other surgeons’ patients, we were able to go to him and ask what he was doing differently, and then extend this to other surgeons.’’

Such analysis is becoming possible in even more complex systems, Graydon says.

Data visualisation and geospatial tools that generate heat maps showing where demand is located are becoming standard offerings from many vendors.

‘‘We work with a health network that supports after-hours doctors’ surgeries,’’ she says.

‘‘Each surgery collects data about where people have travelled from and what illnesses they’ve gone for, and that data is collated and analysed.

‘‘This helps the network decide if they need to open up a different surgery, if they have the right doctors on call, if there’s a trend over a particular period and whether they need to change the skillsets.’’

Graydon says that, in some sectors, a whole new level of sharing is emerging.

‘‘A number of organisations are talking about sharing data and benchmarking against each other,’’ she says.

‘‘People are setting up forums to compare data, and not just within same industry, but sometimes between organisations in different industries.’’

AtoBI’s clients are ‘‘a real mix’’, from small businesses, with only two people working in the business, through to large corporations with thousands of employees.

The first step is to do a ‘‘health check’’ on the solution that the business is currently using.

‘‘Then we talk to them about the options available – not toolsets, but options – and the different ways to answer the questions with the data they’ve got,’’ Graydon says. ‘‘It’s not about the toolset we use or that the customer currently may have. It’s more about working out what the right fit would be.’’ Graydon says AtoBI enables customers to be ‘‘as self-sufficient as they want to be’’, and if required provides both code-writing and training. Some customers want AtoBI to manage the solution for them, perhaps because the business does not have the right staff. ‘‘For these, we’ll do managed solutions, or a mix. ‘‘Others don’t want a tool, they want it embedded in their website, and for these we will do a bespoke solution.’’ A common challenge is to encourage staff to pick up and use the solutions provided. ‘‘Many businesses already have a lot of toolsets, but if you don’t have user adoption, it’s not very cost-effective,’’ she says. Other businesses continue to rely on toolsets that have been completely developed by their team from end to end, with no outside influences. AtoBI did a proof of concept for a Telco that had been doing all their decision-making on another product, Graydon says. ‘‘Our numbers came out differently from theirs, so we went through line by line to work out why. ‘‘We found that they had missed a whole division and had been making financial decisions on numbers that weren’t complete,’’ she says. By contrast, with external solution software, ‘‘we know the code works and this allows you to put more governance in place’’.

Risks can also arise from the cost and difficulty of storing and protecting vast volumes of data.

‘‘Over the years, to minimise cost, some companies would say, ’We only need to take 20 per cent of our data and put that into the data warehouse’, and they used only this subset to do their reporting.’’

Decision making solutions are evolving rapidly, says Graydon.

Only a few years ago, ‘‘real-time data views’’ actually meant ‘‘five minutes ago’’, but that is now a reality. ‘‘The technology is now moving forward to predictive and machine learning,’’ she says.

‘‘There are challenges but the stepping stones are there. We need to take all the customers on the journey at their own pace.’’

The technology is now moving forward to predictive and machine learning.

Elaine Graydon