Recent research shows us that four factors or what we call four pillars of the “data-driven enterprise” are the main factors driving organizations that want to compete in the global economy today.
These are enterprise mobility; event-driven analytics; location-specific analytics; and the cloud.
In the 2013-2014 World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness study, technological readiness, business sophistication and innovation are among the most important factors determining whether a country’s economy is prepared for the future in terms of competition.
Side note: The report uses Spotfire to help you visualize this comprehensive report on where each company stands in economic readiness. We thought that was pretty cool.
Are You Technologically Ready?
The Global Competitiveness report defines technological readiness as the “agility with which an economy adopts existing technologies to enhance the productivity of its industries, with specific emphasis on its capacity to fully leverage information and communication technologies (ICTs) in daily activities and production processes for increased efficiency and enabling innovation for competitiveness.”
We believe the data-driven enterprise embraces existing technologies and leveraging data. And it’s a step we’ve “stepped up” in our latest release of Spotfire.
Our customers rely on analytics to empower their teams at the front lines and in the corporate office. And with the move toward a mobile enterprise, we’ve made vast improvements to accommodate for that.
For example, we focused on delivering personal KPIs to the last mile of the enterprise in our latest version of Spotfire. These are the people who need accurate and relevant operational information wherever they are. And it needs to be on their devices, when they need it and personalized for their job functions.
Is Your Organization Sophisticated?
According to the WEF report, business sophistication “concerns the quality of a country’s overall business networks and the quality of firms’ operations and strategies. These factors are particularly important for countries at an advanced stage of development.”
Location, Location, Location
One of the factors examined in this ranking is how well companies and suppliers from a particular sector are interconnected. When organizations are “clustered” or “interconnected in geographically proximate groups,” the report shows that efficiency and innovation in processes and products are created.
The companies that embrace location and its importance in data analytics will obviously have a step up when it comes to business sophistication. By incorporating multi-layered maps, geocoding and data overlay into their data analytics processes, organizations can make real tracks in competitiveness and readiness.
This is another factor we considered in our latest release. Helping users expand their situational understanding through location analytics, which arms them for making strides in efficiency, process and product improvement.
Who, What and When?
On the other side of the business sophistication definition are operations and strategies (branding, marketing, distribution, advanced production processes and the production of unique and sophisticated products).
The data-driven enterprise embraces event-driven analytics to accelerate actionable insight in this area of business readiness. Tracking and identifying data and monitoring important processes (quality control, customer churn and productivity) in real-time offers business value and saves considerable time.
Business analysts and executives see the big picture and drill down to specific events in much less time. The result is better issue resolution and more opportunity for innovation, service and market expansion when your team is armed with data that’s new, fresh and insightful.
Event-driven analytics really answers the test the Global Readiness report gives in innovation for a country’s economy. Is the technology helping improve efficiency, quality of life, and/or offering opportunity for new products and services?
When we can automate tracking and identification of new trends and outliers, we can focus our companies on improving efficiency, life and products and services.
The Pillar That Makes It All Stand
We can’t do event, location or offer mobile analytics without the fourth pillar of the data-driven enterprise – the enterprise cloud. Just like a country’s infrastructure, a poised company needs a solid foundation. And a secure platform to analyze and collaborate on data is of utmost importance. That’s why we’ve put particular effort into the Spotfire Enterprise Cloud. Our aim here is to allow new analytic applications to be deployed rapidly and with minimal burden on IT.
