Data Driven Success

This is the fourth article in a series which will discuss the importance of being data driven and provides a no-nonsense guide on how to best transition your organisation.  This article details how to automate your processes and visualise your data. The final article in this series will discuss how to implement your dream data solution.

PART 4: Make Your Data Work for You

Let’s assume that your data solution is well-designed with perfect data, what’s next? What can you do with your data? How will your data drive you to success? To address these questions I’ll focus on two main themes today: Automation and Visualisation.

Process Automation

There are a number of different automation technologies, and here are a few examples:

• Robotic Process Automation or RPA is where the robot effectively mimics the actions of a human using a Graphical User Interface. In other words, it can replicate inputs from a mouse and keyboard.
  
  

• Digital Process Automation automates processes that can span multiple applications, typically in the cloud.
  
  

• iPaaS as we mentioned earlier, covers the flow and transformation of data between different applications.
  
  

• Data Analytics Automation is the process of automatically consolidating, transforming and reporting on data.

There is obviously some overlap between these technologies, but in essence, they all fundamentally have the same purpose, to reduce or eliminate the need for human interaction.  The more you can automate, the faster and better your processes will be.

The Institute for Robotic Process Automation, estimate that DPA/RPA solutions can deliver an immediate saving of 25% to 40% in labour costs alone. McKinsey Digital also found that automating business processes with RPA can result in a Return on Investment of between 30% and 200% in the first year.  These are significant savings and should make a compelling business case for process automation.

Now, you may be concerned about how the prospect of automation will be received by your employees.  Fear of change is a very natural human emotion and understandably people may be worried about their jobs being replaced by robots.

However, from my experience that doesn’t tend to happen with automation.  Automation is an efficiency tool.  It allows staff to do more and to do it quicker.  In the same way (arguably) that computers have made people more efficient, automation just does more of the same.  If positioned correctly with your teams, then it should be welcomed.  They will see it as a benefit. Take Jane from accounting. Each Monday, she has to manually copy and paste hundreds of client details from one excel spreadsheet to another, taking her most of the day and sapping her motivation to work. Jane therefore hates Mondays. With automatic processes, Jane can come into work on a Monday morning refreshed from the weekend and see that the client details have already been pasted into the correct spreadsheet, meaning that Jane can use her talent for more productive, income-generating work and resulting in a happier member of staff.

In fact, research by Zapier in 2020, found that automation benefits 96% of people who use it at work.

Data Visualisation

So, you have a plan to pull all of your data together, it is going to be sparkly and clean.  You are going to automate all your processes and to reduce errors, improve efficiency and make your employees much happier in the workplace.

Well, now it is time to start thinking about reporting and being able to visualise all of that wonderful data that you have.

This image is a really nice way of presenting the problem and the journey that very few organisations complete.  There are lots of variations of this image I should just caveat it by saying that there are some data analysts who believe that this pushes the analogy a bit far.  However, I think from a high-level perspective it demonstrates the journey quite nicely.

Many organisations may get to stage 3 or 4, but few ever get to stages 5 and 6. Sorting, arranging and visualising your data is the easy bit.  But that data is meaningless unless you can gain actionable insights from it. 

Getting data insights is generally an iterative process.  Think of it like an onion.  You need to slowly peel back each layer to discover what is below.

You start with a particular problem or pain point, then analyse the corresponding data.  It shows an anomaly, which in turn needs to be analysed further.  This leads to a hypothesis, which in turn needs to be confirmed.

Many systems will provide basic reports out of the box. While some of these may be useful in managing your organisation, they tend to be static and relatively high level.  To get to actional data insights, you will typically need to extract that data, possibly combining it with data from other systems and finally visualise it with a Business Intelligence tool such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI.

As for which analytics software to use, I think it largely comes down to personal choice and the skill sets within your team.  I am very firmly in the Power BI camp.  It is very powerful, and the licensing costs are reasonable.

Whichever technology you choose, an advantage of these systems is that the reports they generate are interactable and are all stored in one convenient place.  An end user or consumer of the report can play with a variety of filters and slicers to manipulate the data and home in on areas for further analysis.

To Conclude:

Process Automation and Data Visualisation are just two ways that you can make your data work for you and your business that we’ve covered today, but we’ll discuss many more uses including to generate AI models in future posts, so keep tuned!

If you can’t wait and want to find out more what we can do with data, check out our services page.

If you have any questions or wish to discuss this topic in more detail, then you are more than welcome to contact me with any of the following contact details at the end of this article.