A. Artificial Intelligence
Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon, or is on the road to mastering machine learning. Companies want algorithms. They may not understand why, but are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is going after.
B. Business Intelligence
In most cases, companies need business intelligence, i.e. those data analysis strategies and technologies to extract insights from their business information. In other words: you need information to run your business. That seems like a simple request, but is, in reality, a continuous challenge.
C. Customer Intelligence
OK, let’s assume your IT assets are well organized, and your tech teams are leading the way. But what about your customer focus? Many forget this vital consideration but every business starts with a customer and a requirement to serve them better. Make sure your customer sits at the heart of all your endeavors.
D. Data Intelligence
This is where most of the hard work happens. Data is regularly flouted as the new corporate oil, but our understanding of it is indeed like crude oil. Namely, it is somewhere deeply hidden. Actually, the situation is often worse than this: we don’t know how it’s structured, we don’t know where it is, how it’s connected and what the real quality of our data is.
Try asking your teams this simple question: do we have a data model for our company? You may be surprised by their answer…
E. Equity Intelligence
The first company I worked for was a mail order company (for millennials: that was when commerce was done using paper and snail mail…in the pre-internet age). When that company was sold, the price was based on the number of customer records, i.e. the buyer just bought the customer database. To truly be a data-driven company, you must now understand that an individual customer record requires investment to acquire and to maintain, and that value is only created by capturing your relationship with those customers.
F. Financial Intelligence
If you come this far, your investment decisions are relatively easy. You must regard your customer data base as a company asset. In doing so, this provides a sound basis for your decision making with regards to your AI, BI and (Big Data) technology investments. Because that is all that’s left for you to do… Invest in team and technology.
If you’d like to find out more, drop me a line at m.haagoort@intellerts.com.
Martin Haagoort
MD Intellerts