What’s Your Company’s Digital IQ?

Many companies are accustomed to the concepts of market intelligence, competitor intelligence and customer intelligence.

Many companies are accustomed to the concepts of market intelligence, competitor intelligence and customer intelligence.

But with the explosion in the amount of data available to companies from internal sources and scattered across the Web, creating actionable analysis to solve critical business problems requires a new type of intelligence – digital intelligence.

But what is digital intelligence? And how can companies use business analytics to boost their digital IQs?

Forrester Research Inc. recently defined digital intelligence as successfully tracking multiple customer interactions and managing massive volumes of data to provide analysis that allows companies to make key decisions.

Digital intelligence is an analytics strategy rather than a singular project or technology, according to Forrester. It requires a company to develop a road map that notes the state of its current analytics strategy and then detail a plan to close any gaps.

For example, Forrester suggests a company:

• Develop a strategy that will balance the needs of the customer with the goals of the organization;
• Leverage skills within the organization to deliver advanced and highly accessible analytics throughout the company;
• Use metrics and key performance indicators to evaluate users’ experiences against business goals;
• Put into place the infrastructure to collect, process, store and distribute actionable analytics.

Moreover, Deloitte Consulting concurs that this new frontier of business analytics is allowing companies to drive smarter decisions and deliver better results by answering substantial questions. And they do it by meshing structured data they have long analyzed with new “signals” coming from customer interactions like clickstream data and social media content.

“Every client from the boardroom down to the front lines wants to understand how they apply business analytics and all the information that we have gathered from all the different sources over the years to really make a difference in their business,” notes Jane Griffin, a principal with Deloitte. “So they are looking at that information asset frontier and are trying to apply it to everyday decision making and get better results.”

But transforming into a “data-driven” organization in the era of big data requires that companies break the too-common silo structure of data that separates critical information gems in marketing from those in sales from those in manufacturing, adds Capgemini.

“There has to be an organization-wide approach instead  . . .  not only to integrate touchpoints across channels but to ensure that all business activities are truly customer-centric and data-driven,” Capgemini’s Mania Strube notes in a blog post. “Every department has to have one integrated aim: retrieve as many data as possible and communicate these insights into the company.”

Capgemini offers these guidelines to a company journeying toward a larger digital IQ:

• Deliver value to customers to make them voluntarily provide data;
• Engage customers in a personal way to encourage involvement;
• Support multichannel customer interactions;
• Analyze online conversations about products and services;
• Track customer behavior online and offline.

Next Steps: See how Spotfire version 4.5 empowers users to discover actionable insights hidden in big data and unstructured information in our upcoming webcast, “What’s New with Spotfire 4.5,” taking place Thursday, May 31 at 1 p.m. Eastern.