These are weird times to be working through. With the coronavirus going around the world people are suffering with their physical health and many more people are suffering from anxiety about their future. The lockdowns instigated by governments are in place to mitigate the speed of the transmission of the virus, but they have adversely affected many industries and the livelihoods of many people. Hopefully the safety-nets introduced alongside the lockdowns will help individuals survive financially, but how are companies and organisations going to fare, and how will those who lead them decide on their next steps?
Data – it is vitally important to the immediate future of these organisations.
It is free – it is already owned by the companies who logged it, generated it, stored it – but it needs to be unlocked, interpreted and analysed.
- How do you know if your sales are continuing as before or drying up?
- Are your costs suddenly greater than your revenues?
- At what point in the future might your costs exceed revenues, if revenues continue on their current trends?
- Who is your most productive employee, what working patterns do they have and how do they achieve their success?
- Which sites are generating the most income right now?
- Where are our new enquiries coming from, what’s changed about what people need from us?
- Where are the bottlenecks in the supply chain?
- What have we sold out of, and what is in the warehouse but not on the shelves?
- Which of our customers have struggled to pay on time in the past, and which of them may need support with orders soon?
- Who contacts you with what kind of questions at difficult times, and can you do more to help them now?
- Which of your clients might need more assistance or care during a lockdown, because their home is not safe, or their place of work is closed?
The answers to these questions are in your data already. You can help your organisation get through these strange times by finding the answers, doing the analysis. You need connections to the data, you need tools to extract it, and tools to manipulate and visualise it.
There are companies that specialise and can help with all of this; for example, we are experts in data and agile projects to reveal these answers. You know your customers, your employees and your industry, we know how to access and interrogate the data which can help them and you. There are hundreds of things that an organisation needs to be doing right now to help it thrive, and limited resource to achieve all of them. People are priorities. But your data needs to be looked after as well and could be the key to keeping everything else going.
You might need support with your existing systems while your IT department focuses on fixing VPNs and getting home-workers up and running; there might be new reports to be built to look at short-term trends or new areas of business; if you need a new database to be interrogated and a feed added to your data-mart; the crisis may show that your existing reporting systems are not fit for purpose and need restructuring; or you might want a rethink on what your KPIs are and how to measure your investments and future performance. Our role as a trusted partner is to guide you through these and other problems. There are a great many companies out here that can help you answer these questions, and will have seen organisations like yours go through the changes you want to go through. Talk to us, or companies like us and we can help you make the most of the situation.
It’s a corny thing to say but a crisis is also an opportunity. This could be a time to skill-up staff with some remote training, while systems are less busy they could be taken off-line and processes made more efficient, DR-scenarios can be tested, new business-plans formulated and KPIs defined. Staff working from home need to be given tasks to keep them focused and active and we can be involved in any and all of these projects.
Don’t hesitate to speak to us about the opportunities that might be presenting themselves, or about the struggles you’re having and how we can help smooth them. We might not be the right company for you at this time, but we have contacts and connections and can make recommendations. We’re all in this together and we’ll get though it by working together.