Magazines
By MBUGUA NJIHIA
Many entrepreneurs and executives at small or
medium-sized businesses regularly rely on gut to make critical business
decisions.
No business is short of competitors seeking to win over
their customers. But every executive or business owner must continually
adapt to remain relevant and profitable.
Margins are the lifeblood and must be grown or at
the very least buffered against any environmental conditions that may
eat into them. This calls for the use of business intelligence tools.
Larger organisations often times have a turnkey
business intelligence benefit drawn from the premium licences that they
pay for their enterprise resource planning and customer relationship
management systems.
SMB’s however must be smarter about how they
analyse the market data available to them layered on in-house
information to derive actionable insights.
A daily dance for business is to deliver a
consistent product or service at a minimally fluctuating price point.
This normally involves multiple factors in the delivery pipeline that
must be proactively managed.
Relying on gut, group think or a simple excel sheet
with a decision matrix may not suffice due to subjective evaluation or
inputs, formula errors as well as the size and variety of data in play.
Since the creation of Watson, IBM’s cognitive
computing platform, IBM researchers have been in a constant quest to
extend its service offering.
Trade off analytics is one of the many services
that became available earlier this year that can be spun off in their
BlueMix cloud service platform to power “optimal alternatives across
multiple criteria” on demand.
Many businesses already use cloud based platforms
such as Lipisha, PesaPal, KopoKopo, Uhasibu, WezaTele among others to
manage sales, collections and inventory. Therefore, getting smarter
about optimising their businesses is a data ingest away.
Applicable to all service sectors and made
accessible via the cloud at decent price points, having Watson crunch
the data and present all possible analysed options visually, brings to
life the idiom, seeing is believing.
The beauty is that the value can be realised by
both the in-house publics to fine-tune business processes and by
customers to the business where they are provided with tools such as
wizards or recommendation engines that help trigger a purchase decision.
Interesting use cases for the business of
government can be imagined, but that perhaps is for another day as the
takers are few in that segment.
Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic | www.mbuguanjihia.com | @mbuguanjihia
No comments :
Post a Comment