This news is undoubtedly welcomed by small and medium-size businesses. But only those that can anticipate every nuanced shift along the way will gain the competitive advantages necessary to stay ahead, including improved customer and employee experiences, product and service creation, tight customer connections and fewer skill gaps.

Although every business leader knows that such predictive insight comes from data,听听conducted during the first few months of the pandemic revealed the importance of understanding it accurately and quickly. The study reported only 32% of medium-size businesses are acting on data-derived insights, which could be attributed to struggles in either interpreting data with analytics tools or supporting analytics-based decision-making altogether.

Building data insight with interconnectivity

A considerable challenge to becoming a business driven by data insight is gaining the confidence of the employees who use the information. Data should be viewed as a prerequisite for all decision-making, never as a nuisance or an afterthought.

Ultimately, fostering such a data-driven mindset requires a strong IT infrastructure that helps ensure data is complete and accurate and shared and provided freely and securely across functions, external partners, suppliers, and customers. This step toward interconnected alignment of knowledge, visibility, and insight allows the workforce to immediately understand and embrace the optimized collaboration, transparency, predictability and continuity that today鈥檚 technologies offer.

The IT infrastructure should include three foundational elements:

1. Consumer-grade analytics

This evolutionary step toward 鈥渁nalytics for everyone鈥� allows decision-makers to access and analyze data, predict, and plan scenarios, and report insights, outcomes, and lessons learning all in one application. Intelligent capabilities 鈥� such as natural language querying and processing, machine learning, and predictive analytics 鈥� can also augment and accelerate decision-making without requiring additional training in data science.

2. One platform for data management and analytics

Bringing data management and analytics together on a single business technology platform reduces the complexity of maintaining multiple technologies, such as limited communication, data sharing, and collaborative action taking across departments. This addition to the IT infrastructure provides the structural support needed to collect, integrate, and analyze information in a landscape that includes legacy systems, multi-cloud applications, public and personal data sources, sensors, and smart devices.

3. Embedded enterprise analytics

Don鈥檛 let this phrase fool you: the word 鈥渆nterprise鈥� does not mean that embedded analytics is just for your largest competitor.听It鈥檚 about providing medium-size companies scalable, cross-departmental access to a 360-degree view of the business without switching from one application to another to get work done and collaborate with experts and stakeholders. This capability combines business intelligence, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities into one cloud environment and in the context of business processes.

Reaping the rewards of interconnected intelligence

By augmenting their IT foundation with these three elements of data management and analytics, employees can make decisions that not only optimize their specific area, but also help each other succeed. Take, for example, the relationship between workforce management and spend management.

HR analytics typically focus on recruitment, talent and performance, learning and development, and compensation and retention. But with the assistance of intelligent capabilities, HR leaders can correlate that traditional information to health and safety compliance, travel and expense management, procurement, and project assignments.

Including people data in these critical business indicators allows professionals outside the HR function to identify and solve potential issues early and generate value as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible. Plus, departments can measure and predict the full impact of their spending decisions while eliminating organizational blind spots, minimizing maverick buying, improving supplier performance, and optimizing the cost of quality, goods sold, and sales.

Bringing to life a stronger, more resilient business

Just imagine the possibilities when every business function can access and act on connected, integrated data from a single landscape. Will your operations realize a responsive supply chain, deliver an engaging and always relevant customer experience, help ensure every employee is successful, or innovate new product or service?

Whatever the answer, this level of interconnectedness unquestionably provides a unique differentiator that medium-size businesses need 鈥� and can acquire with ease 鈥� to positively shift the trajectory of their recovery and growth.

Discover how your business can achieve these goals by consulting the Oxford Economics report, 鈥�.鈥澨齈lus, you can learn more by accessing our guidebook, 鈥�.鈥�

Mario Farag is senior director of Marketing for Analytics at 麻豆原创.
This article was originally featured on Forbes, .

The post Learn How Midsize Companies Use Data Insights To Create Sustainable Growth appeared first on 麻豆原创 Southeast Asia News Center.

Organizations that managed to strengthen their digital capacity are ready to take on whatever is thrown at them, good or bad. We鈥檝e all been through a forest fire 鈥� but it means that the survivors have more room to grow.

The good news is that everything went digital and cloud, helping create a more level playing field between larger and smaller organizations鈥攁nd allowing smaller organizations to take their natural strengths to new levels, if they can seize the new opportunities.

2020 was all about trend acceleration 鈥� the speeding up of things that were already happening, but cramming 10 years鈥� worth of change into six months. And as the start of 2021 has already shown, it鈥檚 far from over yet. There will be more changes to come, and responding dynamically to these challenges will require a more holistic, interconnected approach.

Research data from听听shows that respondents from midsize organizations have been confident about their ability to respond quickly throughout the pandemic, adapting to remote working and new supply chains, and even new products and services. It has been inspirational to see these organizations鈥� intense focus on the changing customer and employee experience pay off, meeting new demands that nobody would have dreamed of a year ago.

The personal relationships and the concern for employees under the tough circumstances, and the unwavering focus on the human aspects of business are clear in the research, and it鈥檚 something that has helped companies survive as we all look forward to better days.

The research also shows that to succeed in the decade to come, midsize organizations need more systems thinking: ways of management that understand that every function has to be sharing data and sharing processes, and working together as one 鈥� not just in your organization, but also in the greater ecosystem of customers and partners. This is important so that you can move quickly as circumstances change and thrive in the future.

Today, nearly 29% of midsize businesses cite a lack of coordination between different departments as a top internal challenge, and 44% cite effective collaboration across functions as a major barrier to transformation initiatives.

Fixing the problem can be broken down into three main areas:

1. Business processes
2. Data analytics
3. Talent and workforce strategies

Organizations need to make sure they鈥檙e working towards integrated, end-to-end听processes across the business, ensuring that data is shared widely, and getting a complete view of the workforce, with the skills they need to be able to respond quickly to changing needs

While midsize organizations have made progress in each of these areas over the past year, the research shows that there鈥檚 still lots of opportunity for incremental improvement.

The first step to becoming more interconnected is to realize that smaller organizations already have an inherent advantage. It鈥檚 in your DNA: you have closer relationships with your clients and customers, and your CEO may even know the name of everybody in the organization. That鈥檚 powerful in terms of employee and customers experience, and results in a huge business advantage. The trick is to leverage those inherent advantages of size 鈥� the ability to move fast, the ability to work together鈥攁nd take them to the digital realm, by applying the technologies that you need to make them scalable, and to extend the benefits to your now highly-distributed workforce.

Technology

Data analytics is a big part of this, and it鈥檚 an area where are lot of the organizations surveyed, of all sizes, could use some improvement. Just 39% of midsize businesses said they had all the data they needed to support analytics-based decision making. And the opportunities are even bigger when it comes to particular areas such as external data sharing with partners.

To be a digital business, you need a hub, something like an integrated ERP system, and there are lots of new advantages coming through technologies such as artificial intelligence. This fundamental technology enables everything from greater ERP efficiencies through robotic process automation to customer-service chatbots. It may seem to be a challenge for a lot of companies in this segment, as you鈥檙e trying to compete against larger companies who probably have more money to spend on this. But thanks to integrated AI, cloud-based services and on-tap expertise, you can be on the right side of digital divide and get the technologies you need to compete and thrive.

People and relationships

Technology is never enough on its own. It鈥檚 important that midsize organizations maintain their natural advantages, by avoiding organizational silos, avoiding breakdowns in communications or information, and ensuring that the whole company can respond holistically to the challenges ahead to be as effective as possible.

And this year has shown again the importance of relationships outside the business, working with core suppliers to share the same information that you have inside the business 鈥� where appropriate 鈥� to make sure you鈥檙e all running to the same strategy, and understanding the risks ahead, is going to be important.

Finally, the research reemphasizes the importance of people. This is a moment to focus on leveling up your workforce, making sure that people have the skills, the career path, the tools they need to do the work you need them to do and to stick around and do it for you! Investment in people and skills dipped over the past year 鈥� for valid reasons: after all, when your car is in a skid, you first focus on the skid. But now it鈥檚 time to focus on the road ahead for your people as you move forward.

One thing that jumped out of the data was that it鈥檚 important to give people a greater purpose as part of your business. Leading midsize organizations tended to have corporate purpose programs that weren鈥檛 just about feel-good volunteer work, but were solidly anchored in the business itself, deeply related to what people were already doing as part of their daily tasks.

The leaders of midsize organizations need to give people a sense that money isn鈥檛 only reason they come to work in the morning, to make sure they understand how they fit into the bigger, interconnected picture. If you鈥檙e touching every part of that worker experience including the part that goes beyond the paycheck, to doing something good, then you really have given yourself an opportunity to succeed.

Conclusion

In summary, in 2021, leaders in interconnected business will reap the rewards, with superior employee engagement and retention, increased innovation, and profitability growth鈥攁ll essential factors for finding new ways of working and enabling future success.

For more information about how to achieve these goals, please consult the Oxford Economics report, 鈥�.鈥�

Timo Elliott is vice president and global innovation evangelist at 麻豆原创.
This article was orginally featured on Forbes: .

The post More Interconnected Business Fuels Cautious 2021 Optimism For Small And Midsize Organizations appeared first on 麻豆原创 Southeast Asia News Center.