Experts discuss the significance of data universe for progressive business decision-making

Deriving critical business insights from data and accordingly blending decision making goes a long way in creating successful business outcomes. With the availability of a myriad of data, it is important to find new ways of engaging with data that can power progressive decision making.

As a result, market leaders across industries are increasingly shifting their focus from being data-driven to being driven by ‘decision intelligence’.

At a panel discussion hosted by Lumenore in association with YourStory, industry experts – featuring Varun Gaur, Associate Vice President- Product Management, Lumenore; Kirat Chhina, Head of Product, Urban Company; Dr Bhupinder Singh, Head of Data Science, Ecom Express; and Peeyush Jain, Chief Technology Officer, Verloop – came together to discuss trends and solutions that make the best possible use of decision intelligence to deliver successful business outcomes. Here are some of the key highlights.

Data and decisions go hand in hand

Varun kick-started the session by highlighting that traditional business intelligence platforms have their own set of limitations when it comes to data analysis. “There is a need for conversational intelligence and advanced analytics to simplify digging the right kind of data for business decision making,’’ said Varun.

According to a report by Gartner, more and more organisations will leverage robust BI by 2023 that will practice decision intelligence, which combines a variety of decision-making techniques with artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and business intelligence (BI). This technology enables you to gain additional context around business decisions, scale your ability to utilise massive amounts of data for insight, and review the impact decisions will have across your organisation. “Businesses need to build a robust data universe and easy-to-implement data architecture to strengthen the data-decision ecosystem,” he added.

Leveraging data to identify growth opportunities

Kirat emphasised the role of data in building brand-customer relationships. ‘Data is at the heart of all decision making. With Urban Company’s nature of business, it is important to identify the kind of partners that are comparatively successful on UC’s platform and who gets to make the most money,” he said. There is a need to dig deeper in the data universe, said Kirat, to identify key business drivers as well as customer preferences.

Talking about how Ecom Express leverages data to optimise end-to- end logistical operations, Dr Bhupinder said, “Data plays a very important role for us across all miles of delivery. It helps us drive better performance, anticipate fleet planning, enhance consumer experience, and more.”

Data - a key enabler to meeting ever-evolving consumer needs

Peeyush spoke at length about how customer behaviour is quickly changing as instant gratification becomes the need of the hour. To solve this challenge, Verloop is building an operating system for customer support and state-of-the-art conversational AI.

“One of the key enablers that help us deliver this experience is undoubtedly data. Over a period of time, we have managed to build a data store that helps AI understand the customer better,” said Peeyush.

“Intelligence and automation are some of the other enablers helping us achieve our mission,” he added.

Helping startups solve data issues

As startups begin to scale, different business processes need data optimisation. It is important to differentiate from the contaminated market data which can occur from fake social media accounts. “At Lumenore, we offer an all-in-one data universe to solve various data operation issues. We help startups create a strong data intelligence ecosystem to empower them with authentic data that can aid in business decision making,” said Varun.

According to Varun, the creation of a data universe leads to a faster and more intuitive understanding of how data variables can contribute to the growth and revenue of the company.

How to increase data efficacy?

“We are at the cusp of the next big industrial revolution that is set to be triggered by 5G. This will transform the supply chain, manufacturing, and several other sectors. I believe this is one trend that will bring in very high data efficacy,” said Dr Bhupinder.

Reiterating the same, Kirat stated, “5G is going to be a game changer. There is also going to be an increased focus on streamlining and organising the trove of data available with the companies.”

Throughout the session, the panellists emphasised the need for businesses to strengthen the data ecosystem to be able to take progressive business decisions.