According to the Gartner Report “Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics, 2020”, we are on the road to a new way of reporting and learning from our data, to inform business decisions.
Data and analytics has for a long time been at the heart of decision making for any successful business, ecommerce or otherwise. However, we are now at a critical point of change.
Currently, we are bombarded with various data sources and as the Gartner report eloquently puts it, “Business people are drowning in data and especially as the complexity of data increases, they are struggling to identify what is most important and what are the best actions to take.”
Businesses and business leaders need not just to see the ‘what’ of their performance, but to understand the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ behind the data points. Dashboards generally focus on the what – some in a more engaging way than others, but the vast majority get nowhere near the ‘why’ let alone the ‘how might I react to this?’ question.
So typically, businesses have to invest in extensive analysis of the data points within these dashboards. Doing this well requires a skilled mind with the right eye, to be able to draw the conclusions between the data points. In my view this means a scientist with a marketing mindset not a marketer with GCSE Maths.
Only 5% of graduates from universities across the OECD area study STEM subjects and most of those want to apply their data skills to scientific endeavor rather than commerce. For some businesses this has meant they continue to rely on GCSE Maths. For others, they have created MI/BI teams populated with analysts (often with finance, accounting or business degrees) rather than scientists working their data. Whilst this will likely be more credible than the marketer with GCSE Maths, there is still a difference and it will come in the ability to take an unbiased, rigorous and robust approach to the base data and then understand where to allocate outcomes to causation, correlation or coincidence.
Without graduate-level science as the base discipline in e-commerce, you cannot maximise the opportunities in your data. Data Stories from commercially minded scientists who understand how e-commerce works provide businesses with actionable takeaways based on their individual analytics and pave the way for improving performance.
With the scarcity of STEM graduates from many higher education systems, I can now offer a solution that enables businesses of any size to access the capabilities of scientists who work in e-commerce to curate, collate and create data stories that will pave the way for improving performance. It’s a simple and straightforward subscription service that could help you transform your business. It will also save you hours of trying to puzzle your way through pages of numbers that never seem to quite add up.