Saying your business is driven by data analytics is one thing. Using it to your advantage is quite another.
Brands often expect immediate benefits from data analytics, without using insights to help steer their marketing efforts.
About three quarters (74 per cent) of enterprise architects aspire to be data-driven, yet less than a third (29 per cent) say their companies are using it to generate measurable business outcomes, according to a report from Forrester. The report says data insight will be a “key competitive weapon” for companies this year.
Why Data Doesn’t Turn Into Results
That gap between ambition and results usually isn’t about a lack of data. Most companies already collect plenty: website visits, sales records, support tickets, social media mentions. The problem is what happens next. Data often sits in separate systems owned by separate teams, gets pulled together in a monthly report, and by the time anyone looks at it, the moment to act has passed.
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Being “data-driven” in a way that shows up in the numbers means closing that loop. Someone has to ask a specific business question, the data has to answer it quickly enough to matter, and the answer has to change what the company actually does.
This performance gap is driving an increase in demand for streaming analytics and what Forrester calls “systems of insight.” For most organizations, the best approach is a solution that captures customer insight and engagement in real time.
Batch Versus Streaming
Traditional analytics works in batches. Data is collected over a period of time, stored, and then analyzed all at once, often overnight or at the end of the week. That’s fine for questions like “what sold best last quarter?”
Streaming analytics works differently. It processes data as it arrives, event by event, so a system can spot a pattern and react within seconds. That matters when the value of an insight fades fast: a surge of complaints about a product on social media, an ad campaign that isn’t landing with the right audience, or a sudden change in demand. Forrester’s idea of a system of insight goes a step further, tying that analysis directly to the decisions and actions a business takes, rather than leaving it in a dashboard.
An example is the integration of IBM Cloud and Bluemix, which can deploy cognitive APIs to analyze a high volume of social media data in seconds using streaming analytics.
When combined with Watson’s Personality Insights, 40 calculated personality traits can show you if the people viewing your ads match the profiles of your target customers.
Analyzing continuous, incoming data and stitching that data together over time can also create something special: moving pictures of data that tell a powerful story. The bonus: It’s something companies can immediately act on.
What’s Changed Since 2016
The names in this story have changed. In October 2017, IBM rebranded its cloud under the single IBM Cloud name, retiring both the Bluemix and SoftLayer brands. Two years later, IBM made a major bet on the cloud: in July 2019 it closed its acquisition of Red Hat for about $34 billion, positioning itself around hybrid cloud, where companies run workloads across their own data centres and several public clouds.
The underlying idea has lasted, though. Real-time data pipelines are now standard plumbing for many large organizations, and the newest wave of AI tools has made it easier to pull meaning out of unstructured data like social posts and customer reviews.
Personality profiling of audiences has also attracted far more scrutiny than it did in 2016. Inferring traits about people from what they post raises questions about consent and how that data is used, and privacy laws have tightened in many places. Any marketer using these techniques today has to think about what customers have agreed to, not just what the technology can do.
What It Means for Marketers
The core lesson from Forrester’s numbers still applies. Collecting data, or buying a platform to analyze it, doesn’t make a company data-driven. What matters is picking a few decisions where faster, better information would change the outcome, and building the process so the insight reaches the people who can act on it.
Start small: one campaign, one product line, one customer question. If real-time analysis changes what you do there, and you can measure the result, you’ve closed the gap that most companies in Forrester’s survey hadn’t.
Frequently Asked Questions
How big is the gap between wanting to be data-driven and achieving it?
Forrester reported that 74 per cent of enterprise architects aspire to be data-driven, but only 29 per cent say their companies use data to generate measurable business outcomes.
What is the difference between batch and streaming analytics?
Batch analytics collects data over time and analyzes it all at once, often overnight or weekly. Streaming analytics processes data as it arrives, so a system can spot a pattern and react within seconds.
What is a system of insight?
It's Forrester's term for analytics that is tied directly to the decisions and actions a business takes, capturing customer insight and engagement in real time rather than leaving results in a dashboard.
What happened to IBM Bluemix?
In October 2017, IBM rebranded its cloud under the single IBM Cloud name, retiring the Bluemix and SoftLayer brands. In July 2019 IBM also closed its roughly $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat.
How can marketers close the data gap?
The article suggests starting small with one campaign, product line or customer question, and making sure real-time insight reaches the people who can act on it and that the result can be measured.