With COVID massively impacting every aspect of our lives, business organisations are not left behind. Despite all the chaos this pandemic has created, it has indeed expedited businesses to accelerate their digital transformation journey. In order to strive in this economic downturn, it has become essential for organisations to have the ability to adapt to the rapidly changing environment — i.e. leveraging data to navigate the workforce transformation.
A recent McKinsey global survey reports that although eight out of ten organisations have embarked on a digital transformation journey, only one-third of those initiatives have succeeded. For such organisations, not only it deters their efforts but also creates disengagement among employees because of their misaligned goals and objectives.
Successful execution of digital transformation requires elevating data assets, analytics, daily business processes and people towards aligned business goals and outcomes. In fact, people, processes, and data are an organisation’s richest assets, and by addressing these three assets together, businesses can create transformative outcomes from their digital transformation journey.
Convergence Of Data, Process & People
The first priority in embarking on digital transformation is to make information more accessible to everyone across the organisation. A report from Harvard Business Review shows that 55% of organisations agreed that data analytics for decision-making is extremely important today, and 92% confirmed the increasing importance of data and analytics through 2020 and 2021.
Yet, despite the rise in the value of data analytics in the current era, many organisations are burdened with outdated processes. According to IDC, 70% of an analyst’s time is spent searching for data, and 44% of data workers’ time results in unsuccessful attempts. Together with the lack of talented professionals to harness the true power of data, these struggles further refrain business leaders from creating a modern analytic environment for their organisation.
With siloed data residing all over the place, one of the key challenges faced by companies is the advent of a variety of tools and platforms, which are either too complicated or lack sufficient training. These tools, therefore, set them back for truly achieving a digital transformation.
By adopting a unified technology platform, organisations will be able to achieve end-to-end automation in a low cost, agile approach through automating analytics, data science, and entire data-centric business processes, that otherwise required a myriad of disconnected point tools and manual hand-offs.
This technology, termed as Analytics Process Automation, allows anyone in your organisation to easily share data, automate tedious and complex processes, and turn data into results. APA places business outcomes first, where users can start with the business case and can quickly create analytics, data science and process automation outcomes, without requiring any specialised skill sets.
One of such cases was with PwC, where the company has combined analytics process automation with its experience and global market reach to help empower organisations to accelerate their automation journey. By leveraging APA, not only it is allowing companies to drive top-line revenue and bottom-line returns but also helping in efficiency gains, and upskilling of their workforces. Thus, the resulting impact of APA is faster business results, fully automated business processes, and the ability to rapidly upskill in order to make an impact.
As analytics becomes imperative for succeeding the digital transformation, business leaders have started understanding the importance of upskilling their employees to keep pace with the transformation of processes and work. In fact, the emerging shortage of highly trained analytics professionals in the industry is driving businesses to find ways to enhance the data literacy of the in-house employees to undertake analytics journeys.
Upskilling Employees With Analytics Competencies
Regardless, it is easier said than done — transforming traditional employees into a data analytics workforce has been one of the biggest hurdles for digital transformation. Empowering employees with the right analytical tools is crucial, but to actually create a data analytics workforce for a successful digital transformation, upskilling is the key.
It is even highlighted with Deloitte survey data, which stated that companies where all employees are educated about leveraging data, exceeds 88% of their business goals compared to the ones with only a few trained employees. This shows that to democratise data access and introduce automatic analytic processes, organisations need to critically upskill their employees.
For this, businesses need to shift their employees’ focus from forced learning to a more outcome-focused mindset, where employees can explore self-service analytical solutions for bringing faster business outcomes. Alteryx is one such company that helps businesses recognise the tremendous potential of data and how it can be turned into actionable insights. Alteryx’s Analytic Process Automation technology unifies analytics, data science and business process automation in one easy-to-use platform, enabling business leaders to upskill their employees.
With Alteryx APA platform, every employee, regardless of their technical expertise, will be empowered to analyse data and deliver business insights. The company believes that APA Platforms can empower and upskill 54 million data workers, identified by IDC, to solve critical business problems to drive returns and efficiency.
Consequently, as the economic downturn may continue even post-pandemic, one thing has been quite eminent for business leaders — data analytics is the key to a successful digital transformation. Thus, a good convergence of data, process and people can commence a victorious journey towards digital transformation.
