Dive Into Your Data for Better Business Outcomes

Data is the currency of business.

Here’s how to harvest impactful insights from your data to make smart decisions, streamline your operations, reduce your risk, and stay ahead of your competitors.

Every business generates data, but that certainly doesn’t mean every business knows what to do with it. Left unexamined, data is nothing more than numbers in a spreadsheet, but hidden within it, critical insights that can propel your business forward are waiting to be discovered.

Data analytics is the process (or processes) you use to analyze data in search of meaningful information, a mix of math, statistical analysis, and even AI or machine learning. While C-suite decision-makers need the answers analytics provides, they often don’t know how to find them. It’s up to analytics experts to handle data strategy, data analysis, and business intelligence processes to do the work of creating dashboards, and reports that executives can use to gain a real-time look at business performance and make decisions based on science rather than speculation.

Effective Analytics Are Crucial to Your Success

Making your data intelligible and actionable to maximize revenue, capture customer behavior, and smooth operations is a journey, but it’s crucial to make the effort if you want to unlock the data potential of your business.

In an ideal environment, business and technology operations work together to uncover deep insights and solve complex use cases, with all the internal teams aligned toward the same goal: data that’s reliable and intelligible and that enables you to prove hypotheses and act upon them rapidly.

In reality, however, many businesses suffer from a legacy of collecting and storing data in silos. Data is everywhere, but there is no commonality, no lingua franca, and in the end, no single source of truth on which to base decisions. Analytics experts refer to this situation as a lack of “data maturity,” and creating data pipelines that cut across the organization and store data in one place is an important early step on the journey.

You must also consider the governance of the data the business collects. Where does it come from? How, where, and by whom was it processed? Data quality analysis is sometimes overlooked, but it’s another crucial step on the journey, one that helps you avoid the classic problem of “garbage in, garbage out” that can result in biased decision-making.

Even then, businesses must step back and ask some fundamental questions: What, exactly, do we want to know? Why do we want to know it? What will we do once we have the answers we seek? Are we even asking the right questions? While it’s great to be a “data-driven organization,” the data may drive you off a cliff if you’re misinterpreting it or using it incorrectly. For example, businesses sometimes make the mistake of conducting predictions/analyses on data sets that don’t have statistical representation; this introduces the risk of bias, and you may veer off course.

Get a Clear Window into Your Customer Base

There’s no better way to drive growth than by understanding your customer data footprint, and analytics help make it happen. When looking at customer behavior, it’s easy to see where they click, but it’s harder to discover and understand the "whys" below that. You need to add those multidimensional layers to your analytics to get a fully rounded picture that you can use to your advantage going forward, whether it’s with targeted promotions, reminders to return, or other techniques to increase engagement. It’s in scenarios such as this that machine learning may come into play, leveraging vast amounts of clean data to detect patterns in customer data that can lead to smart retention or upsell strategies for the future. In customer-centric scenarios, analytics can help you:

Starting Your Data Journey

Your data journey begins with questions. How can you:

It’s a mistake to assume that a single data analyst should be responsible for every aspect of the data journey. A better plan is to know your data maturity level, and then deploy a team of specialists focused on various aspects of the analytics effort, with some concentrating on the data infrastructure; some focusing on the actual data science and visualizations, and others putting analytics to use to monitor key points in your business and operational effectiveness. That last part, using analytics to gauge the overall health of the operation in real-time, is especially important. After all, if your service or product isn’t available, you’re not generating revenue.

With a team in place, you can start to act on the wish list of insights you’re hoping to uncover. Among the metrics and processes you can analyze:

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The CI&T Strategy 

The CI&T data journey is unique to and customized for each business but always has one goal: to guide the business through a data strategy tailored to fit the company's reality. We promote a constant data evolution that starts at raw data and goes all the way to positive business impact.
The steps on our data journey are designed to make sense to all the stakeholders along the way. We consult carefully at every step, making sure you will reach your analytics goals.

Conduct a maturity assessment. We help you understand the pros and cons of your current data state.
Create a timeline. Once we know your goals, we determine how much work is required and how long it will take for you to get the analytics you need.
Interpret the data. We make sure your analytics teams understand how to make informed decisions based on the analyses you are now producing.
Customer Centric approach. We make sure that you are applying your resources and effort and what really matters and generates value for your business.

CI&T Services for Optimal Analytics

Turn to CI&T to help you take every step along your data journey:

Data Ingestion: Connect with a data pipeline, build a foundation that removes silos, and create that all-important single source of truth for your organization.
Data Transformation: Build strategies and data utilization practices to support your digital transformation and enablement goals.
Data Governance: Exercise authority and control over data asset management with strictly regulated activities for planning, monitoring, and execution.
Data Quality: Ensure your organization is utilizing the best data available for accuracy to guide strategic decisions.
Data Literacy: Create a framework that makes your organization's data meaningful and readable.
Data Platforms: Build and develop systems for data democratization such as customer data platforms (CDP), marketing resource management tools (MRM), and data warehouses.
Machine Learning/AI: Drive predictive outcomes with data to enhance customer experiences, refine marketing offers, and manage inventory.
Reporting and Advanced Analytics: Derive business insights with analysis and data visualization.
Making sense of your potentially massive volumes of data is the key to making better business decisions.

CI&T's experience in strategy and engineering can help your organization glean insights to drive greater impact. Our customized process will guide you through all the phases and get to the place where raw data turns into important realizations and smart strategic decisions that will give you a competitive edge.

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