Why You Need to Future-Proof Your Data and Analytics

Corporate leaders in all industries will strive to collect, analyze, and leverage large amounts of business data, and this is quickly becoming the basis of competition to ensure relevancy in the future. Those who fail to do so may fall behind.

The Data Landscape

The idea of creating business value from data is not new, however, efficacy requires agile thinking. How will data and analytics be used by companies in the years ahead? Today, most organizations have complex and fragmented architecture landscapes that make it difficult for departments to share and disseminate data; and many of them are still not leveraging modern technology for planning and forecasting to stay ahead of operational performance issues and market trends. Over the next few years, data analytics will be used to extract value using explanatory and predictive models to drive fact-based business management decisions and actions. It will be viewed as a corporate asset and the key to enabling companies to adapt strategies and financial plans to new challenges and opportunities.

It is this demand that has fueled the growth of BI platforms, data analytics, and data modeling software as essential tools for processing and analyzing data in a timely manner, and presenting the information in a way that can affect positive change and influence business decisions. Analytics capabilities will increasingly be embedded in all sorts of business applications to optimize organizational performance by turning information into intelligence and willpower workflow and decision-making in a range of operational areas. Market research firm IDC predicts that, by 2021, 90 percent of new intelligent systems will have an embedded decision architecture that automatically detects and evaluates conditions and makes decisions about how to respond and evaluates conditions and makes decisions about how to respond — leading to transformational outcomes1.

Data as an Asset

CFOs and CEOs will not only consume more data, but they’ll sell it to others as a new source of revenue. Already, 50 percent of large enterprises are generating data-as-a-service revenue from the sale of raw data, derived metrics, insights, and recommendations, according to IDC.

As data gains value as a corporate asset, data security will likewise become more critical, leading to greater reliance on cutting-edge data security services and software. Already cybersecurity is a major threat, and therefore concerns over the vulnerability of sensitive data will increase. Businesses will need to rely on advanced security services from outside experts to protect data – a challenge they can’t meet on their own as hackers get more sophisticated and the volume and cost of attacks rise, thanks to new threats such as IoT botnets and ransomware.

Companies that fail to protect their data will lose more than internal assets; they also risk losing the trust of their customers and partners, as well as their competitive edge. This is why savvy finance professionals are moving now to future-proof their data and analytics capabilities to win the long game.

Unifying Data with EPM

In the enterprise performance management space integrating data from multiple source systems is an integral part of creating business value. Combining both financial and operational data to become the best snapshot of the business in real time. To learn more about the integration of data in EPM download our white paper.

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1 & 2) IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Analytics and Information Management 2018 Predictions, doc #US42619417, October 2017.