Faced with four distinct crises – the pandemic, stagflation, political division, and climate change – CIOs and business leaders are under more pressure to implement radical innovation.

They must be willing to pilot new technologies, architectures and approaches and watch out for the long-term transformational game-changers to ensure success.

Most – if not every – business or large organisation sits on a treasure trove of internal and open-sourced data. Drawing insights from these often-unconnected data sets is paramount to stepping up to today’s challenges.

At the same time, the pandemic has fuelled digital transformation efforts, with McKinsey estimating that business-critical initiatives have been accelerated by several years, creating more actionable data in the process.

Enter Augmented Business Intelligence

With this explosion in data, augmented business intelligence (ABI) will play a significant role in a CIO’s armoury, helping to drive innovation, efficiency, effectiveness and business growth. If data is the new oil, then business intelligence acts as the 21st century’s
modern-day refinery, extracting information and purifying it to capture the greatest actionable insight possible.

This data – ranging from sales to employee data – can often be static, needing to be manually uploaded onto systems and dating quickly once available. However, ABI and automation tools speed up this process, improving knowledge sharing across business units, regions and functions.

ABI also allows businesses to merge internal insights with external datasets, allowing companies to view the bigger picture across categories, products, competitors and trends to develop a clear proposition in existing and new markets.

With conventional computing hitting the wall in tackling these issues, the business intelligence (BI) market has increased massively. Today, more than half of all organisations across the globe are using BI to drive innovation, reduce costs and improve operations.

Leveraging relationships with the board

Generally speaking, business IT investment focuses heavily on three key areas; cyber, the cloud, and business intelligence. With business growth as the critical driver to most, if not every organisation, ABI is one the most impactful approaches to help drive long-term growth.

This can manifest itself in several ways, such as building and deploying more accurate models faster, automating model management and monitoring, or reducing bias and improving explainability.

Crucially, ABI doesn’t just deliver better operating efficiency and drive innovation, but it is an avenue to achieve better cost optimisation – which is a crucial concern for CIOs and businesses as we begin to see the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel.

Undertaking an ABI initiative can seem like a complex undertaking. Issues such as data access and maturity, data preparation, data exploration and visualisation, automation and augmentation, user interfaces, machine learning, flexibility and openness, governance,
regulatory and privacy risks, performance and scalability, delivery, platform and project management, model management, and not forgetting overall strategy planning are all key considerations.

CIOs must leverage relationships with the CEO, board and other key stakeholders to get the project off the ground and ensure the spotlight is focused on key deliverables to provide clear outcome-based value in addressing business opportunities.

CIOs often choose to plan for augmented capabilities within their broader data and analytics strategy. This must be dynamic and consider four cornerstones: stakeholder outcomes, data-driven vision, value propositions, and capabilities/deficits. This will ensure speed, accuracy, explainability, and collaboration.

Effective collaboration is key to success

To deliver enterprise-wide value that properly considers and aligns with the overall business strategy, CIOs must work closely with their external vendors to understand what augmented analytics capability they have both now and in the future.

This may also mean CIOs need to consider intermittently refreshing their operating model to get the most benefit from the initiative, to ensure that they are open to innovation as more technologies become available.

This type of undertaking requires a lot of heavy lifting, but the insights it can offer are game-changing. We’ve recently worked with a major supplier of temporary power generation and temperature control equipment to transform how their 600-strong sales team approaches customer acquisition.

Working with key stakeholders across multiple BUs, the result was a game-changing market intelligence platform that enables the business to identify, rank and engage the best customer opportunities in real-time, from hundreds of thousands of global opportunities.

The intelligence provided to the executive team completely transformed how the business approached go-to-market activities. The results thus far have been impressive – a 25% increase in pipeline, some of the most significant new projects the company has ever seen and incremental revenues of c$8m p/a.

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Ultimately, augmented business intelligence can drive real value across an organisation and support strategic, long-term goals. Public planners and leaders are using it to combat the impact of climate change, overpopulation and pollution, and it is this big picture thinking where it comes into its own.

For a business, performance, governance, security and, of course, organisational politics can also represent challenges, so CIOs should consider setting up pilot projects to demonstrate value and build trust with business stakeholders as an excellent first step.

In the world of big data, seeing truly is believing and showing early indications of what’s possible will enable the savvy CIO to garner support much faster, de-risk many of the deliverables and help keep budgets in check. With this approach, the sky truly is the limit.

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