The world is becoming smarter with every passing day and data is at the center of it all. In truth, we have passed almost a decade after the expression – ‘Data is the new oil’ – was first echoed by Clive Humby, the innovator behind Clubcard – the world’s first supermarket customer loyalty scheme. Clive was the one who injected the whole world with the concept of data as a resource, which holds extraordinary potential when it is mined and analyzed – just like oil. The business realm today is mesmerized by the level of impact that data is able to engender, regardless of the industry vertical.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on data becoming the key to competitive advantage, since the organizations, especially SMEs being in the survival mode with scarce resources at their disposal. With no room for error, it’s imperative that they hit the right nerve with everything from marketing to operational finesse. In the aftermath, be it a retail or online business, your organization’s ability to compete in the market will increasingly be driven by how well you can leverage the operational and customer data, apply analytics and find new avenues of improvement and market opportunities. Retail organizations finding ways to leverage otherwise unused video (surveillance) data through computer vision is a case in point.

If you are a small business owner, you would be amazed at the ways data analytics can help you ensure business continuity. Indeed, in many ways, big data could be of more help to small businesses than the larger enterprises, owing to their agility and ability to act more quickly on data-driven insights. Social media could be a particularly valuable source of data for you, with easier accessing and analysing customer feedback much easier and cheaper. In that regard, Twitter makes it easier to mine data than most platforms, since almost all conversations on the platform are public. But you definitely need specialist partners to make this digital journey fool proof. In this issue of CIO Insider magazine, we feature some of the eminent data analytics solutions providers. Read to know more about them.

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