Why companies with a data-driven culture achieve competitive advantage

In today’s data-driven world, many organizations face major hurdles as they navigate a transformation journey that eliminates silos, unifies data, and transforms it into value. For many, building a culture of innovation remains elusive.

IDC’s Future of Intelligence predictions for 2023 show what’s possible when businesses get it right. Top-quartile enterprise intelligence performers are 2.7 times more likely to have experienced strong revenue growth over 2020–2022 and 3.6 times more likely to have accelerated their time to market for new products, services, experiences, and other initiatives.

But businesses must avoid trying to solve every problem and instead narrow focus to areas like customer experience or productivity, says Vrinda Khurjekar, Senior Director, AMER business at Searce.

Companies that commit to clear and focused action now will achieve a competitive advantage. Searce’s work in a range of industries indicates that successful companies embrace specific strategies and tools based on an intelligent data environment as they focus on building a culture of innovation. With data at the core of business strategy, operations become more seamless.

“If you don’t embrace data capabilities to help drive your culture, you’re definitely going to get disrupted,” says Khurjekar. “We’re seeing it across every industry. It’s no longer a ‘good to have’.”

Khurjekar cites several barriers that enterprises continue to face. They often have patchwork and duplicitous software and solutions. They want a better customer experience and to increase productivity, but there’s a lack of clarity as to what that means.

Finally, companies need talent to execute, however traditional enterprises continue to struggle with attracting top talent in a challenging job market.

To bring about culture change, Khurjekar says, organizations should pick one or two use cases to start with.

Customer lens

“If you’re trying to do too many things at the same time, the overall initiative gets lost,” she says.

Choose initiatives by looking through a customer lens, she adds, and collaborate “ruthlessly” with multiple departments. Employees, too, need to see success and analytics need to be used to help them not just customers.

Leaders that want to create a culture of innovation should start by looking at their current processes with a critical eye. If processes are not helping the company to get ahead, then a change is needed.

“Even before we get to the technological challenges, it’s about the willingness to really experiment and to disrupt yourself,” says Khurjekar. “You need to have that courage as an organization to do that.”

Next, it’s crucial to embrace data capabilities to help drive that innovative culture, including an intelligent data cloud that’s agile, discoverable, intelligent, trusted, and open. An intelligent data environment gives enterprises capability and scalability from an infrastructure standpoint to solve business problems more seamlessly.

“Cloud offers a good home to be able to experiment fast and also to put use cases into production quickly,” Khurjekar says. For example, a transportation company that needs to better secure its warehouses can’t wait several years to do so. It needs to be able to quickly connect to cameras already installed for better monitoring and alerting.

Cloud enables intelligent data-driven insights and allows businesses to do quick proofs of concepts and move into production fast, she says.

She adds: “As an organization, if you say, no, I’m going to build on my own, you’re missing out.”

Cloud removes the overhead so the business can focus on solving the problem at hand.

With its data and analytics services, applied AI service, and secure API product Recognic.AI, Searce helps support clients across the entire spectrum of their data journey. Organizations that take steps toward developing a data-driven culture appreciate that this is an ongoing, long-term process.

“It is truly a journey and not a one-time thing,” says Khurjekar.

To learn more about how Searce can help, click here.