Does Data make you think in new ways?

Time to focus back on Data.

Lots of interesting thoughts out there, so as a change from my posts, here is some of the best content from others that impressed me this week…

Many organisations in recent years have looked into the challenge and opportunity presented by all this coverage of “Big Data” and “Predictive Analytics”. Some have invested in ways that improved their Marketing effectiveness or Customer Experience.

But very few companies have looked at how such capability could revolutionise the way they run their business.

Necessity is still the Mother of invention and so much innovation happens in start-ups and the smaller end of the SME market, where you always seem to have too few resources. I found this fascinating article, commenting on an article in the Wall Street Journal by Chris Mims. It certainly makes you think about the democratisation of data & intelligence making possible new business models:

Even if you’re not planning to replace your middle managers with open sharing of the data needed across your organisation, other challenges continue. One of them is the need to achieve reciprocity. By that I mean a fair value exchange with your customers for the value they give you by providing so much data. As well as the challenge of  trust & demonstrating data privacy, this requires innovation and customer experience thinking to deliver meaningful value back to customers. This useful article from HBR talks through the challenges:

When sharing data with your customers or internally a further challenge is to help those receiving it to be able to consume the key messages and accurately understand the information it contains. As we’ve often covered on this blog, data visualisation can play a large role in helping with that. In this huge curation achievement, DataVisualisation.CH has pulled together a wide range of interesting tools they’ve selected as useful. Well worth a browse:

Besides its utility, I also found that last site very beautiful. I’m probably getting geeky there so I better stop!

How has use of data, or the possibilities presented by today’s data technologies,  prompted you to think differently?