Insight Driven Organizations – How can Global Business Services contribute to the journey becoming on IDO?

In the past half decade, along with the fast-moving technological development we experience in our era, data has become the focus of successful organizations. Even in our everyday life data collection surrounds us: cookies on web pages gather information about our preferences & behaviors on the internet, public transportation companies prepare statistics about our travelling habits, banks or other financial institutions can track our spendings in space and time, etc. The goal of data gathering and analytics is to support fast, confident decision-making and to enable pioneering actions.

But what is an Insight Driven Organization (IDO) exactly? We call those organizations IDO that are driven by Intelligence, Insight and Information, in order to be Innovative at an Industrial scale.

Some organizations misinterpret the meaning of IDOs, as they believe becoming an IDO is only about improving their IT infrastructure. This is only partially true, but becoming an IDO is a journey ending in the complete renewal of the ways how organizations operate including strategy, people, process, data, technology and logic.

Since Deloitte has started preparing the annual Global Insight Driven Organization Surveys back in 2017, a lot of companies have moved up in terms of IDO maturity. The different maturity stages are the following:

Stage 1 - Analytically Impaired: The organization is aware of analytics, but the data strategy is poorly defined and there is only little or no infrastructure at all to support.

Stage 2 - Localized Analytics: The organization started adopting analytics, articulating data strategy in silos and building data capability.

Stage 3 - Analytical Aspirations: The organization is expanding ad-hoc data management and analytical capabilities beyond silos into risk & compliance functions.

Stage 4 - Analytical Companies: The organization is industrializing analytics to aggregate & join data from rich, broad, timely sources into meaningful content and new ideas.

Stage 5 - Insight Driven Organization: The organization is transforming analytics and orchestrating data to streamline decision-making across all functions.

Organizations in the first three stages are data-driven, while in the last two stages are considered insight driven.

In the latest Global Insight Driven Organisation Survey, we can get familiar with hot topics and current or potential future challenges of the respondents in details. 

Strategy

Deloitte’s latest survey shows that from a strategical standpoint the current challenges organizations are dealing with, are mainly to realize Return on Investment (ROI) from Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) investments and to identify how to measure the value of the insight driven solutions. We believe the AI vision needs to support the overarching business strategy, embedding into the underlying drivers which move an organization toward its goals, this way ROI and the value of analytics will more easily be measurable.

Another important improvement is that most organizations recognized the importance of ownership of the analytics functions and created new C-level positions that has not existed earlier: Chief Data Officer or Chief Analytics Officers.

People

Also, with the challenges of becoming an Insight Driven Organization, the importance of competent workforce is higher than ever, companies are looking for ‘Purple People’, who have both business and technical skills, they can form a bridge between developers and the business in order to achieve an efficient and user-friendly end-product that supports business needs and improves decision-making process. Most survey respondents believe in upskilling current employees who already have the required business or technical knowledge and the ambition to grow as professionals by extending their knowledge spectrum. 

Process

From process perspective we can see that most respondents adopt agile processes and procedures for delivering analytics and only a smaller group (mainly consisting of organizations that have strict safety-related requirements and robust governance framework) use purely waterfall delivery methods. Deloitte believes that technology has moved away from big, monolithic technology systems that we are used to, and the future is about tiny, highly agile, very sophisticated and clever changes. 

Data

Over the last 5 years, we can see that the data quality of the survey respondents has significantly increased as organizations have realized how important good data quality and data governance can be to increase efficiency, transparency, accuracy, governance and trust to support better decision-making. It is imperative for organizations becoming IDOs to fully understand the intent of each application and actively manage the portfolio of products and services in order to maintain or improve efficiency.Cyber security is also becoming critical as security issues, unauthorized breaches can have a potentially significant impact on business, financial results and / or reputation. Organizations started to take the topic seriously and have taken steps to increase their capabilities.

Technology

Survey respondents work with diverse vendor landscape, but they mainly use the solutions of big software companies (Microsoft, Salesforce, etc.), but some also work with a varied range of small, medium and large analytics vendors and technologies.The single biggest technological innovation of recent years is the advent of cloud, most survey respondents has already adopted this solution: 30% already created and they actively follow a cloud-first strategy, approx. 60 % started using the technology, while only around 10% have no cloud instances.

Logic

The next challenge of becoming an IDO is to implement an enterprise-wide AI strategy. Most respondents are at a low maturity stage from this aspect, around 70% of respondents have no AI strategy or just started exploring the opportunities, only 6% confirmed they have already prepared an extensive strategy and deployed the related products.

How can GBS organizations support the aspirations to become an IDO?

Over the past years, the focus of GBS organizations in Central and Eastern Europe has shifted from mainly transactional to more value added, business partnering or strategy related activities. With this shift, their place in the organizations have also changed, they now play a vital role to support achieving their strategical goals. At the top of GBS maturity, the focus has shifted from cost saving and process efficiency to innovation, GBSs started to develop new services, processes and capabilities, among others providing better Business Insights.

Traditionally data-focused business functions such as Finance, Accounting, Tax, Operations, Sales, Marketing and Advertising, and IT are likely to be more analytically mature. As significant parts of these functions are operated in GBSs, it would be logical to include them from the strategical planning phase of becoming an IDO as they can be not only contributors, but even the drivers of this organizational change.

Sources

Global Insight Driven Organisation Survey Report: Benchmarking your Analytics Journey FY20/21 Survey Report

Insight Driven Organisation (IDO) Data-driven insights to work everywhere, everyday

Deloitte’s Global Business Services (GBS): Introduction and Methodology