Data and analytics are a huge enabler for businesses who are looking to make better decisions, operate more efficiently and build great employee and customer experiences.
Though this has been true for decades, and almost every company recognises this by now, there is nonetheless still a significant missed opportunity in how we are approaching this today.
The problem is that most businesses use data to report on the past. Their analytics are based on historic and potentially delayed data, and are then served through staid dashboards to managers and executives who use it to make strategic decisions on long term time horizons.
The missed opportunity is in using data in a much more forward looking and proactive way. This involves using real-time and operational analytics to understand what is happening right now, then using it to intelligently guide employees towards their "next best action".
When a business has this capability, they can identify and react to opportunities, and solve problems before they impact customers and before they ever become visible as a KPI on an executive dashboard.
Real-time data and operational analytics have huge potential. They can support new use cases and products, create efficiencies and cost savings, underpin amazing customer experiences and be used to accelerate business growth.
Todays Approach
Unfortunately, many businesses are some way from getting there.
Technically, their data and analytics systems are built on slow batch processing foundations, which means that users receive their data on dashboards or reports a significant amount of time after the original business event took place.
More importantly, many businesses have not even fully understood the potential value of real-time data. Backwards looking and delayed business intelligence is "how things have always been done" and there is a common view that they "don't need real time" or that "delayed data is fine".
Fortunately, this is beginning to change. Businesses today are constantly looking to innovate and gain an edge in the market, and increasingly realise that in order to build the employee and customer experiences they want, they need a much more sophisticated approach to data. This is leading to a significant uptick in interest in real-time analytics and the associated technology.
From the vendor side, we also think that the data industry has done a poor job of selling this vision and pushing their customers forwards into more sophisticated use cases. Service providers are happy to continue building "business intelligence" dashboards with historical, delayed, aggregated data, whilst from a tooling perspective, many of the big players have not fully delivered solutions that are real-time and streaming enabled.
Why Ensemble
This situation was our motivation for founding Ensemble.
We want to help our clients take advantage of the opportunities associated with real-time data, operational analytics and AI in an accelerated timeframe, but with a sustainable win-win partnership model focussed on driving the best outcomes for our clients.
We also would like to build a proposition that is particularly optimised for startups and scaleups, who we believe we can help to deploy powerful data and analytics capabilities whilst building a technology platform that supports their future ambitions.
If this sounds interesting, please reach out to us today for an informal discussion.