Over the last few months the team at Mindspot headquarters has been thinking. When I say thinking, I mean dreaming, analyzing, discussing, and revisiting the drawing board over and over again. The industry of insights and data is changing. But of course, we all know that. What remains unseen is exactly where to step on to this fast-moving train to the future. It’s the question that has crept into boardrooms, discussed in conference rooms, hammered out in offices, and concerned executives all over the world….
“How do we get ahead in a marketplace that is moving forward at warp speed?”
When you consider the topic of innovation and change, you can’t help but talk about Uber. Uber has disrupted the transportation industry. The name itself has become both a verb and a noun in our language. Want something different? ‘Uber it.’ Want to solve a problem? ‘Uber it.’ Companies that ‘uberize’ are companies that increase their value.
While Uber’s presence and the problems they solve are hard to ignore, what I find so intriguing is their process. Simply put, they streamlined the complicated.
Companies who ‘uberize’ make no material products to sell. These companies don’t reinvent the wheel, instead, they reinvent the process. They use services that exist only in silos to create a parsimonious approach to an outcome. And, they cut the middleman.
Marion Maneker writes in an article on the Uberization of the Economy:
“A very talented developer once told me that the secret to a world-beating service like Dropbox was to make something very, very complicated seem devastatingly simple. To me, uberizing meant trapping a series of innovative processes—phone-enabled geo-location, payments and driver management and distribution—into an [app-] accessible service.”
The process of research and insights is often done in silos across a business: finance, sales, marketing, social media, customer relationships, acquisition, etc. Each department with their own data, their own initiatives, and their own fragmented picture of their company or their consumer. But this approach creates blind-spots in an ever increasing world of connectivity and global scale of business.
Unfortunately, blind-spots have a way of affecting your bottom-line. And increasing blind-spots eventually cost you money. 72% of business and analytic leaders aren’t satisfied with how long it takes to retrieve the insights they need from data. The problem is, the data isn’t slowing down for us to catch up. An IDC report released in December estimated the total volume of global digital data will continue to double every two years. Predictions suggest that the volume of enterprise data alone will increase by 650% between 2014 and 2019.
What does all this mean? It means we all know business is changing and innovating. But, it also means that to remain sustainable your company must begin to look at your customer, operations, and transactions across your departments, not partitioned in each department.
It’s the fluid and comprehensive picture of your organization that reveals the most profitable data. Data about your customers, about your transactions, about perspectives surrounding your brand, and ultimately, about your bottom line.
Authored by Leah, part of the Mindspot Team, headquartered in Orlando, Florida.
