The Game of Strategic Leadership in the Time of Big Data and Analytics

There is an increasing demand for business leaders to leverage digital strategies to decide with more foresight, speed, and savvy. As we can see, digital technologies are not transforming all sort of products and services across the industries, and business processes are now becoming more intuitive and insightful.

The management approach of business leaders is also changing in terms of the inner workings of organizations. In the future, we can witness a new generation of business executives who rely largely on data and analytics in the background of artificial intelligence and machine learning to take more informed decisions.

In this article, we are trying to demystify this arena to show how things are moving out of the laboratories and getting into executive suites. The business executives of modern times need to answers many unconventional quandaries as how you, your team, and the organizational structure evolve at various stages? One needs to find solid answers for many questions like:

• What does it mean by leadership behavior?
• What type of an organizational structure will be ideal for better composition of teams?
• What skills may be needed for the employees?
• What level of performance may you expect?
• How well the IT systems and applications will enhance the efficacy and flexibility of business leadership?

The new era of data-driven leadership

We are stepping into the times of data-driven business management. The rules of it are still getting formed, but as we can see, the broader outline of this concept is sharpening now. As a business leader, one has every chance to tap into these new sources of data-drive insightful business management, but only if someone upgrades their analytical arsenal and technology tool-set to tap it’s potential.

Nowadays, data-driven business management and decision making touch the end-to-end organizational aspects. It is not simply limited to the specific department or function. Many decision makers; however, consider the data-driven management from within their silo only. Marketing professionals may seem data-drive management as an exercise for gaining better consumer insight. On the other hand, manufacturing executives may consider it as a tool to optimize the effectiveness of the processes. The bankers may be more focused on the potential of data analytics to reduce fraud.

Consider it more holistically, the data-centric business leadership and decision-making initiate five major activities like:

• Innovative business models and product/service offerings
• Operational analytics
• Risk analytics
• Customer analytics / commercial analytics, and
• Enterprise analytics of the underlying systems and capabilities.

Data–drive business leadership and managerial decision making is a very challenging and demanding activity even at the functional programmatic level. However, it can create significant value and help curb the ill-fated activities. Adding to it, the executives may also refrain from any activities like delegating the initiatives to low-level teams, which may be further constrained by the traditional structures and processes. As RemoteDBA.com reiterates, they should also learn to avoid any stumbling blocks which others may have encountered.

A few questions to consider 

These questions may help business leaders to form efficient data-driven organizations. Try to answer these question in light of your unique business needs and the effort to find the answers will doubt up as your solutions for existing problems and help get a better insight towards data-driven strategic business leadership.

1. What tool-set is required to I upgrade may analytics arsenal?
2. How is it possible to drive teams towards analytics-based decision making?
3. Is the organization fully leveraging the benefits of interdisciplinary and agile teams?
4. Does the organization have the scope to leverage from “democratized data”?
5. What may short-term programmatic approach be helpful to achieve the short and medium-term business goals?
6. Which parts of the workforce needed to be trained on analytics and how to do this properly?
7. If external hiring is considered, where should one leverage it to strengthen the organization?
8. From where to acquire data, where to store, and what to do to improve the usability of existing data sets?
9. Where is it needed to expand the investments on data and data systems?
10. Are the business priorities/goals getting properly reflected in the roadmap for big data technology?
11. Is it possible to make an additional investment to gain the know-how for implementing appropriate technology choices?

Becoming a data-driven leader

The executives who want to become data-drive business leaders and convert their business through data-driven insights should first start with transforming themselves. By adding the most needed skill sets and gaining expertise in data-centric management approaches with the help of analytics tools, next they have to move on the corresponding teams and then finally to their organization. Such a solid transformation requires intensive action.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite is an ideal tool for aspiring enterprise leaders to manage their business with data-driven insights better. The latest Enterprise Edition Plus of the Oracle BI suite is a sever which is scalable by ensuring parallelism and concurrency to ensure the real value of modern-day BI applications.

This intelligent suite offers centralized data access and calculation by creating a dedicated pipe with which anyone can access information in any form in the best interest of the enterprise. This BI server acts as a central store to all business processes which supplied and consume information through dashboards, intelligent interactions, sensors, ad hoc queries, production and, financial reporting, data mining, OLAP analysis, and through any web applications. All these applications need better access to wider set enterprise-wide data, and all of these require a very sophisticated calculation which can deliver real value.

Oracle’s new BI platform also supports a full spectrum of data access, data analysis, and customized information delivery. All these are integrated into an easy to access and easy to use from anywhere web environment. Each component in the BI suite serves a different category of audiences in an organization, having a different need with the same set of underlying data, but needs to access this data in various ways. Unlike any other BI tools using business data to derive actionable insights, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite brings together all components integrated into one single architecture and thereby enabling seamless users experience and an intuitive approach to data-driven business leadership.