Shopping Behaviour has Changed!! More technology enabled with Multiple Channels...

The technology-enabled consumer’s shopping journey weaves in and out of many channels (web stores, mobile apps, social media, e-mail, kiosks, physical stores, contact centers and more).

During this journey consumers leave ever-larger digital footprints with a growing trail of personal data. This raises numerous questions and concerns, including:

• Who owns the data?

• What is the value of the data?

• How is the data being collected?

• How is the data being used?

• How is the data being protected against misuse?

Mutual Value is Key to Improved Digital Engagement

This growing complexity points to the importance of addressing digital engagement as a strategic business issue. Common principles at industry level can serve as a global foundation for creating an interoperable, flexible and accountable framework for coordinated multi stakeholder action. To develop trust and level the digital playing field requires balancing different stakeholder needs, with a goal of ensuring mutual value. Think of it as a “value triangle”: value to the consumer (in the form of rewards, better deals, more relevant offers, etc.), value to the business (improved insights, greater efficiency, more profitable growth), value to the society (improved efficiency, greater corporate social responsibility).

www.urssystems.com

Read More

ORGANIZATIONS ARE FACING AN EXPLOSION OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION. LETS TALK ABOUT NUMBERS!

Faced with a constantly growing volume of information, organizations today are realizing they need the right strategy to manage and protect their assets. The size of the digital universe is expected to roughly double every two years, increasing 50-fold by 2020.

WHY IS THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION BEING STORED INCREASING?

• More data is generated by existing systems due to business growth

• More data is being captured per business activity

• More metadata, or data about data, is being generated

98% of business leaders said the amount of data they're storing is increasing

17% of business leaders say they don’t want to throw anything away.

14% say they don’t have a defined retention strategy, so they just go ahead and save everything.

At least 50% of the organization’s information is duplicate, outdated, or unnecessary.

Only 17% of companies say they use 75% or more of the data they collect.

All told, 80% of the information we store is unstructured. That unstructured information holds value as well as risk.

Without Information Governance, organizations have a difficult time managing and protecting their information. A comprehensive Information Governance strategy makes it easy for enterprises to maximize value and minimize risks and costs by capturing and governing all information.

www.urssystems.com

Read More

Business Intelligence (BI) strategy has to be based on current "REALITY": Explore the Value of BI in INSURANCE

Building a BI strategy has to be focused on something other than developing the perfect data warehouse. In the most basic terms, if you already have the data, then how will combining that data help you do something new? It might cost less money when it is consolidated, but the cost of consolidation is significant and the cost of maintaining this degree of consolidation is also high. 

Any BI strategy has to be based on current reality. Many companies strive at considerable cost to develop an all-encompassing data warehouse, only to find that as fast as they integrate applications, the landscape changes and they have to change the model. Insurance companies are particularly vulnerable to this problem since sales, service, underwriting, and claims often develop and deliver new applications in isolation from each other.  

Developing and delivering an approach to BI can drive business improvement and benefits realization, and highlight the significance of IT.

The obvious key to all business intelligence (BI) strategies is data. Having said this, perfect data is not required to derive significant value from what exists at any given point in time. It is a simple fact that all insurers generate copious volumes of reporting. It may be poorly structured and little used, but it reflects the fact that a high volume of existing information is held in structured fields and that someone, at some point, has developed an extract to develop a report.

Before delving into approaches, it is worth remembering that insurance-related BI is not as complex as some would have you believe, and it can be broken into five areas that can quickly create business benefit if sufficient transparency can be generated. They are:

1. Reducing expense costs
2. Reducing the average cost of claim
3. Reducing claims frequency
4. Increasing profitable sales
5. Improving customer retention (for those customers you want to retain)
6. Collectively, they drive profitable growth.

Clearly, the list does not cover every aspect of insurance. Everyone has a favorite corner of the insurance universe to explore. The items do represent those areas where the money is spent and where improvements can reduce combined ratios and drive profitable growth. If your BI cannot be tied back to one of the above areas in a clear line of progression, then it is information for information’s sake and adds no value to the business. This is not to say that the information is the wrong thing to gather -- rather, it is the fact that it is not being used effectively. This becomes something to be fixed.

Read More

Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels.

Is Our Education System Gearing Up For the Big Data Boom?

The explosion of Big Data and the impact it has created on the businesses—big or small has rattled every one resulting in awe and amazement in some quarters and uncertainty and realisation of lack of readiness in some others. Whatever may be the nature of current response and readiness, one thing everyone is agreed upon is the inevitability of having to build capabilities to embrace this new phenomenon and take advantage of it rather than getting left behind.

According to IDC estimates the size of the ‘digital universe’ was around 130 exabytes about ten years back, which grew to 1,227 exabytes by 2010 and by 2015 it is expected to become 7,910 exabytes. What is unique about this data growth is that more than 90% of the data has got created in just last two years. With more and more sophisticated tools and methods being made available to extract as well as analyse data from customer interactions, emails, web browsing, social networks and machine sensors and a variety of new device options continuing to be made available enabling more and more web transactions, the data deluge is expected to impact every aspect of the economy. No business or for that matter even not for profit businesses can ignore the significance of Big Data. However, there is a yawning gap in terms of capabilities that businesses possess to take full advantage of the opportunities emanating from their web presence.

While intuition will always play an important role in decision making, ignoring data that could be tapped and made use of would lead to sub optimal decision making. This approach has to be inculcated with employees across the board. This leads us to the question of how is our education system getting geared to produce talent which is equipped with skills to think and act around the use of Big Data.

Building the talent pool for Big Data and analytics requires a blend of mass and customised approach. The mass training and orientation should be planned at high school and undergraduate levels. Customised or advanced techniques and curriculum could be introduced as part of the post graduate studies. Hence interventions should be planned in select schools, develop the proof of concept and train the teachers to tune their minds to the eventual areas where their students are expected to be contributing.

Once the system is ready to take off, it may also be worthwhile to consider setting up special schools for high school education with the objective of nurturing multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and lay a strong foundation for exploring the new frontiers of computing power leading to careers in research, applications and product development. The pre-eminence of the Indian businesses in the global knowledge services driven by Big Data and analytics is possible to be realised when we are able to create entry barriers for other countries and therefore we need innovation and the will power to have a radically different approach to education, skilling and talent pool development.

Read More