Refine big data to valuable intelligence
Erik Tieleman
Published at
They say big data is the new crude oil. In its natural form, it’s difficult to access and impossible to use. Extract it, refine it for a particular purpose and pipe it to where it is needed, and it becomes the most valuable commodity on earth. But a car wouldn’t drive on refined oil. You would need to transform oil into petrol by distilling and cracking it and make it interact in the right way to power your engine.
The same goes for transforming big data into intelligence. It is not only about how you mine it and how you enrich it to meaningful information. Moreover it is about how you create valuable insights. How can you ensure it is applied in a powerful way to nurture flawless disciplined execution and feed continuous improvement? That is what we mean with big data capability.
Multiple data yield losses
Still, even when leaders recognize the power of big data, some have grown ignorant or adopted a tolerance for multiple data yield losses in their organizations.
1. Data mining yield loss – Companies seem to accept that it is impossible to get relevant data out of their ERP systems. This not an IT problem, but a leadership issue; a lack of definition capability.
2. Data analyses yield loss – Companies do not have the right refining operations of data management to look at a granular level to performance and fail to engineer it the right way. This is quite different from spilling all ERP data in a data warehouse. A data warehouse is just a warehouse, and will not take care of refining itself. Leading to losses in the upstream data process that cannot be recovered in the downstream decision making process.
3. Insights yield loss – Whilst the downstream process has to cope with all the impurities from the upstream refining operations, powerful data relationships are not made and valuable insights are lost. On top of it, the opportunity to rally people around a key problem and harmonize thinking what to do is missed.
4. Decisions yield loss – The piping is leaking and most of times not routed as the crow flies. Hence, data is taking extra time to arrive at its destination. In reality, the accountabilities are often not clear, decision-making is unstructured and communication lines are not working. The power of data to support laser-focused on-target decision-making is lost in the daily process.
5. Executions yield loss – Even when petrol finds its way to the engine, power is still lost. The quality of the petrol is important but it has to interact with the other parts of the engine delivering the best performance. In business, power is also lost in execution. Things are not running as designed, people deviate from working standards or specs and leadership accepts deviation from operating rules critical to performance.
Daily operational excellence
As you can see, the capacity of your data could be compromised in many ways. In order to make it the most valuable asset to your people, it needs to be systematically managed to empower and energize them to consistently take decisions and act accordingly.
So drill your well of data and have this new oil flowing through your organization, connect your people with the data and see energized employees igniting daily operational excellence.
Erik Tieleman is Partner at R&G Global Consultants in the Benelux. If you want to know more about big data capabilities, please download our white paper Accelerating strategy execution with (big) data capability or contact Erik directly at erik.tieleman@rngglobalconsultants.com.
