The Strategy-Analytics Revolution
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Analytics is no longer considered just another corporate buzzword. Over the last 10+ years, the power of analytics has been used aggressively by a substantial number of companies to improve business operations. However, analytics hasn’t been able to break the barrier and enter the strategy-planning phase in most companies. While it is important to consider creative thinking and brainstorm while planning short-term and long-term strategies, advanced analytics can help businesses accomplish many strategic goals.
Identifying Early-stage Trends
We live in a world of rising uncertainty, and businesses need to be very agile in creating and managing new strategic initiatives. To do so, companies must balance no-regret actions that will be beneficial in any circumstance and can be implemented immediately in the form of little but bigger bets. Leveraging big data analytics to track emerging trends allows companies to initiate these contingent moves before competitors do.
For instance, NLP tools can analyze publicly available information spanning billions of web pages, academic research, clinical data, etc in order to generate insights.
‘Sentiment analysis can be performed by using some of the real-time tools, analyzing positive and negative sentiments on social channels for your brand and for your competing brands .
Companies must invest in services which are capable of finding patterns in these haphazard data sets and creating insights to help top executives plan strategic moves.
Reducing Bias in Decisions
With the power of analytics, it is possible to calibrate the likelihood of success of various decisions made by a company. It is essential to take an ‘outside view’ when analyzing your planning to minimize bias. By doing so, you are essentially estimating your strategy’s odds of success before you allocate your resources.
This approach will come in handy when a company wants to make a bold strategic move by motivating with a projected success using analytics. In some cases, analytics may help demonstrate that ambition is too big and unrealistic to achieve without exceedingly strong execution.
Anticipating Complex Market Dynamics
A few mathematical models and simulations are already available in the market that can highlight essential assumptions and opportunity costs associated with different kinds of strategic planning by approximating real-world concerns.
Further, these models can help managers understand and predict competitive responses and customer behaviors and also help forecast market demand under different simulations. The modeling methods already available are Monte Carlo analyses, system dynamics, agent-based simulations, and a range of machine-learning approaches. However, a company need not restrict itself to just these models; proprietary models can also be created with data/IT service providers.
Unearthing New Growth Opportunities
Advanced analytics can help explore growth opportunities through strategic planning. Examples could include an attractive industry segment or acquisition target, ideas for a new product launch (or a new service launch), brand extension, or even a new use of an existing product or service.
Companies should invest in the effective use of natural-language processing tools and algorithms. This leverages sophisticated networks to construct and find connections from a significant volume of diverse text data sources .
The insights that will come from such analysis has the potential of providing highly lucrative opportunities.
It is the right time for companies to start exploring analytics in a strategic function, which may already be used in other parts. Tapping into any of the above ideas has the potential to open new strategic getaways. Get more in-depth information at Cogent Infotech.
