A few years ago, we got an evaluation form from a prospective customer wanting to understand more about what we do. In the comments they wrote... “Please don't chase me down like those bastards at Sisense” That little nugget of gold told me a lot about the way our buyers want to purchase software - everyone hates talking to a salesperson too early. So we decided to turn our sales process on its head and put all of our technical evaluation content online.
We missed it, again. But, could we have seen it, even with advancements in data analytics? Many people have referred to COVID-19 as an unexpected black swan event, after Nassim Taleb's famous book, which I’m rereadinging as I write this post. A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.
Digital transformation is not just about technological transformation of the organization, it’s about transforming the culture of an organization. It’s not enough to bolt technology onto an existing strategy and consider it transformed. That’s the message from our Chief Marketing Officer Mick Hollison discussing digital transformation with Charlene Li at Cloudera Now.
Timely, accurate and trusted data has never been more important than it is now during this pandemic. Since late summer, many areas across the UK have had more stringent restrictions imposed to reflect the growing number of cases. Similarly, Test and Trace uses information on who we’ve been in contact with to provide guidance for when we should self-isolate, which in turn helps us personally manage the risk to those around us.
For decades, the analytics/BI community has suffered from low user adoption (~30%). Dashboards and fancy visualizations have only proven to be the starting point of the analytics journey, not the endpoint. We are living in a world that demands far greater agility than a fixed layer of information or KPI can provide. Poor user adoption is the result when the analytics system fails to support the users full journey: from data – to insight – to action.
When it comes to cloud, being an early adopter does not necessarily put you ahead of the game. I know of companies that have been perpetually “doing cloud” for 10 years, but very few that have “done cloud” in a way that democratises and makes data accessible, with minimal pain points. Cloud is an enabler. It makes it easier to collect, analyse, and disseminate information.
