Making better use of data vital to corporate resilience

The pandemic has stress-tested most companies even more vigorously than the last economic crisis. What has helped those that have coped well is resilience, a quality that determines how effectively a business weathers the setbacks that can stretch it to breaking point.

Resilience is about bouncing back and while it's easy to see what it looks like in a person, identifying the qualities that underpin corporate resilience is a lot harder. That said, based on the analysis of 5,000 client projects over the last year, management and technology consultants BearingPoint reckon they've nailed it.

BearingPoint has identified five key characteristics that repeatedly showed up in organisations performing well under pandemic pressure. These characteristics include having a strong knowledge of customer ecosystems, empowering employees to lead for change and turning data into a competitive advantage. Also in the mix are using technology to improve agility and simplifying governance to speed decision-making.

Michael O’Dwyer, an Irish partner with BearingPoint which employs 250 people here, says the analysis makes it clear that resilience requires clarity on desired outcomes and an effective way of weaving the five strands together to achieve them.

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“Resilience is about culture, a drive for improvement and a curiosity to learn and innovate,” he says. “Resilient organisations are those that are not only prepared for volatility and uncertainty, but embrace it to seek out new opportunities.”

Of the five desirable attributes identified in the report, making better use of data will resonate loudly with many Irish businesses as they are constantly being told that data is the hottest ticket in town.

According to BearingPoint, resilient firms all share a similar structured approach to dealing with it. They have a clearly expressed data strategy and they use it to make timely, smart decisions. Their technology and data efforts are also integrated and can be scaled and automated.

That’s the ideal. In reality, there are still two major sticking points for a lot of organisations: how to manage the data they have and what to do with it. One of the main reasons why is a legacy approach to keeping data that sees information siloed in individual departments rather than pooled for the greater good.

“At the moment data requirements are often driven by the needs of business divisions as opposed to being an organisation-wide thing. Changing this requires buy in and senior management sponsorship to move away from looking at things as individual business units to an end to end cycle,” O’Dwyer says.

Data strategy

The big tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook have mastery of the end-to-end cycle down to a fine art and this is the direction all businesses need to be aiming for, O'Dywer says. "For a lot of organisations, data is still an operational thing. It is used to give them a kind of rear view mirror picture. By contrast the leaders in the field are already using it for predictive analytics and informing their decisions going forward.

“Having confidence in your data allows you to give greater autonomy to your team and more responsibility for achieving the right outcomes,” O’Dwyer adds. “However, it’s important to make data available in a way that is accessible.

“We see a demand for dashboards that provide an overview at the top level and support down to the lowest level. These need to be intuitive so that business users can readily explore the data to gain insights and generate new initiatives or new customer offerings. These insights can also be of value to other partners in the value chain.

“Organisations need a joined up data strategy that looks at the overall business need and then considers the right data and analytics (D&A) model as well as the technology required to support it.”

Data may not be the first thing to spring to mind when talking about Leinster Rugby, but BearingPoint is Leinster's technology partner and the team is well on its way to using data to improve both its commercial performance and the supporter experience for its growing fan base.

To gather information, Leinster undertook a study that looked at how the club interacts with its fans through digital channels and it then benchmarked itself against other leading global sporting brands. Armed with the findings the club has implemented a new CRM solution to manage customer data and support interactions with fans and other stakeholders.

“Leinster is obviously a very professional organisation that has been extremely successful on the pitch, so our focus with them has been on the commercial side and on helping them to better understand their ‘customer’ as they had limited information to work with,” O’Dwyer says. “By using data to build a better picture of their supporters, Leinster can offer them a much richer experience and better reward their loyalty. Data can also drive insights into logistics such as how the timing of a match or the weather can affect attendance.”

Halloween may be over, but BearingPoint concludes its study with five scary things that can happen to an organisation without a resilience strategy. These include failing to respond to market trends/customer demand, retention issues and not learning from past mistakes.

“What was done during extreme events was done in crisis mode. It is not sustainable,” the report cautions. “Less resilient players will fail exponentially and over time they will become more and more vulnerable to external shocks.”