According to Clarke, a growing number of businesses are starting to look at the digital information they have as a primary source of value within their company.
“They’re looking at the data they have on their customers and products and realising that with the right data analytics, business intelligence and visualisation tools, they can understand more about the things that matter to them,” he said. “They can find out more about the life cycle of their products and about how their customers are interacting with them. They can better understand these things and as a result build a real and tangible competitive edge.”
Clarke suggested that it is a serious mistake for companies to think of digital business as something tacked on or secondary to their core activities, even if those activities do not immediately seem to be digital in nature.
We have these kinds of digital systems embedded in our own business and so when we discuss these ideas with clients, we can show them in action and it’s often enough for them to ask us to do the same for them, Eamon Moore, E-MIT Solutions
“This is only going to become more true as time goes on, whether Irish companies ‘get’ this or not,” he said.
Recession honed
Exactly how companies arrive at the realisation that engaging with digital technologies can help them differs but Eamon Moore, managing director of E-Mit Solutions, believes that in at least some cases the recession has helped foster awareness.
“Coming out of a recession you find that many companies were forced to cut back on staffing and resources and if they did spend money on IT, their primary interest was in technology that allowed them to do more with less,” he said. “That was true both for us in-house as a company as well as for many of our customers.”
“But in the process of introducing these systems and replacing old processes with streamlined new ones, companies typically end up using digital tools and processes much more than they did before. This has undoubtedly driven a lot of the take up of cloud technology amongst small and not so small companies in Ireland,” he said.
In many cases this experience makes otherwise conservative and risk-averse companies more open to new ways of doing things, and the value stored in their data starts to become more apparent.
“Now people are starting to reinvest in their systems and they’re realising that they could be doing a lot more and getting a lot more out of the way they create and store data. Of course you need to have a solid infrastructure in place but you really need to see IT not just in the traditional sense as an underlying support to your business but as a key part of how you deal with clients, create products or deliver services,” said Moore.
Companies curious to see where further growth in this area could bring them should start by looking at all their processes.
Streamlining
“Could you streamline these processes and at the same time give yourself access to valuable data that would help you build your business? It’s possible to improve your processes, streamline your systems, reduce inefficiencies and also generate something new and valuable in the process,” said Moore.
“We have these kinds of systems embedded in our own business and so when we discuss these ideas with clients, we can show them in action and it’s often enough for them to ask us to do the same for them,” he said.
In his role with Asystec, Clarke sees companies with various levels of engagement with these concepts, some more and some less.
“Lots of Irish companies have relatively switched-on IT departments and already have some data warehousing functionality in place. If they have that then they are already partially down the road. They can use their data to help them understand how they can better do whatever it is that they need it to do.”
For some companies, that will be figuring out how to better serve the needs of their customers to allow them to upsell, attract new customers or to attract higher value customers.
“For companies with that start, they usually want to learn how to augment the intelligence they currently use to bring it into line with the new style of more granular data focusing on individual products or customers. That allows them to start harnessing the power of big data using analytics but they usually don’t know exactly how to go about doing that,” he said.
Meanwhile there are other companies still behind the curve, using some kind of IT system to manage their day-to -day business workflow.
“They may not have any kind of sophisticated business intelligence or analytics capacity — they may be just using Excel spreadsheets if they’re using anything at all — and in my experience they really need help to know where to start. And there are a lot of this kind of company out there.”
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