Key things to consider when resetting your strategy post COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions for a range of industries and business that will influence the ways in which companies operate in the future. 

As businesses shift from response to recovery phase, they need to build resilience, and we believe the key things to consider when resetting your strategy are:

• Be nimble – foster an agile approach to strategy setting

• Digital transformation

• Data and Analytics – enabling smarter, data-driven decisions

• Rebalancing of activities

BE NIMBLE

Agile decision making and strategy setting during a highly disruptive environment will result in greater performance and create a lead over the competition. Companies should consider making a deliberate effort to look beyond the immediate challenges and issues that have arisen as a result of the pandemic and not only plan for the recovery period but also to renew their long-term plan for the “new normal”. There are three key phases to resetting your strategy during a disruptive environment.

Respond. During the initial phase of disruption focus immediate actions on keeping essential business functions operating.

Recover. Move focus to stabilising operations in a more organised and coordinated effort by creating a plan to restore to a scalable state and identifying capabilities that are required to strengthen, refactor, reopen, rehire, rebudget and resupply.

Renew. Shift focus to longer term strategy and durable execution by learning to conduct operations processes and workflows in new, repeatable, scalable ways and then take the learnings and patterns from prior phases to establish the new strategic plan.

Businesses should (if they haven’t already) create a minimum viable strategy and use adaptive tools and techniques to iterate as the new normal emerges. Leaders need to act now because the acceleration of trends are already underway, and businesses need to be faster, bolder, and more agile than ever before to succeed. Strategic planning should become a continual activity so businesses can respond quickly to unavoidable changes.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Prior to COVID-19 digitisation was an area of interest for a lot of companies, but the impact of the pandemic has forced companies to adopt sooner - accelerating digitisation. All industries are impacted by the evolution of technology in some way and to avoid being left behind, companies must consider digital transformation when resetting their strategic plan. Consumers and customers have begun to alter their buying patterns and shift to digital channels, products, and services. In this context, businesses need to rethink their business model and how digitisation can enhance their customer experiences, value propositions, go-to-market strategies, and operations.

The benefits of digital transformation include:  

• Simplification of business processes

• Reduce operating costs

• Business growth

• Enhance digital innovations

• Accelerate speed to market

• Enhance productivity

DATA AND ANALYTICS

The use of data and analytics should be considered when resetting your strategy, as it will become an essential navigation tool, enabling smarter, data-driven decisions in a timely manner. Those who embed artificial intelligence and analytics across the company will be in a superior position to divulge the value waiting to be unlocked. The use of data and analytics will need to be recalibrated to reflect the post-COVID-19 reality, this will involve validating models, creating new data sets, and enhancing modelling techniques.

REBALANCING OF ACTIVITIES

As part of resetting your strategy, you should also consider the rebalancing of activities between those that are performed in-house and those that are outsourced, with a focus on capitalising productivity and preventing any potential disruptions to supply chain.

Looking to build your own post-Covid strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build your recovery strategy in this new landscape, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Data Strategy

Data is a valuable resource but often businesses find it challenging to unlock that value, due to the sheer amount of data available - as well as the challenges which come with collecting, organising, interpreting and activating it.

Research shows that 54% of organisations still struggle to provide stakeholders with data that can inform their decisions.

A data strategy can assist businesses with overcoming these challenges and accessing the value of their data while efficiently using their resources.

DATA STRATEGY

• Unlocks the power of your data

• Helps you to harness the volume of data, which is always increasing

• Improves data management across the entire company

• Assists with efficient resource allocation

Decision-Ready Data

Decision-Ready Data is critical to informing business decisions and deciding on strategic direction. However, research shows that although organisations have been building analytics and insight capabilities, over 54% of organisations still struggle to provide stakeholders with data that can actually inform their decisions.

Common Data Quality Challenges include:

Accuracy, comprehensiveness, completeness, centralisation, source of truth.

Common People, Process & Technology Limitations include:

Process design, platform/technology, capacity, agility/execution speed, lack of automation, analytical capability, organisation alignment, prioritisation.

A data strategy can assist businesses with overcoming these challenges and access the value of their data while efficiently using their resources.

Importance of having a Data Strategy

1. Data Strategy Helps Unlock the Power of Data

2. Volume of Data Is Increasing - 90% of the data in the world became available in the last 3 years.

3. Data Strategy Improves Data Management Across the Entire Organisation

4. Data Strategy Helps You Use Resources Efficiently

Data strategy is a central, integrated concept that articulates how data will enable and inspire business strategy.

Essential Data Strategy Principles

Integrating Data and Eliminating Silos

• Makes data more accessible and fosters collaboration between different departments

• Helps people get data more efficiently and can enable new data-driven projects

Streamlining Data Collection and Sharing

• Having established procedures means you can collect more data more efficiently, and that the data you collect will likely be higher-quality

• It also keeps your information consistent and well-organised, which makes it easier to use and helps you derive value from it

Setting Clear Goals and Objectives for Data Management and Use

• Your goals will drive your data strategy and activities and help you improve how you handle data

Making Data More Visible and Accessible

• It’s crucial that you find a way to store data so people can quickly find and access the information they need without having to create copies of it themselves.

Making Data More Actionable and Easily Shared

• Putting your data in a consistent, usable format will reduce the number of steps employees need to take before they can use it and make it easy to share within the company

Establishing Clear Processes for Data Management – Data Governance Model

• Data governance refers to setting rules and standards for how individuals and groups within an organisation manage data. The goal of data governance is to make data easier to access, use and share to achieve broach broader business goals

• The key goals of a governance model should be clearly defined to ensure success:

  ⊹ Avoid siloed decision-making

  ⊹ Use synergies between business units to improve data assets

  ⊹ Provide business units with support and resources to prioritise data challenges resolution

  ⊹ Support the management of key initiatives across business units

Establishing Guidelines for Data Analysis and Application

• Define guidelines for how employees should analyse and use data

Get hooked on data

You don’t need to be a big fish to make the most of your data. You just have to start somewhere.

If you’ve read a few of my articles, you’ll know I’m passionate about the importance of data and analytics to drive good business decisions both strategic and operational.  Not everyone is doing this, which means there are lots of exciting opportunities for many businesses to unlock. 

Knowledge is power

The organisations that have mastered data analysis have reaped the benefits. Just look at the big players like Netflix and Amazon. Their ability to meet the viewing and buying needs of their many audiences has propelled them into household names. But you don’t need to be a big fish to make the most of your data. You just have to start somewhere.

The 80/20 rule

This rule is relevant for data, analytics and insights. You don’t need to have all the data and the data doesn’t need to be perfectly clean, but it’s imperative you use what you have to take a step in the right direction.

From my experience the following are practical steps to start enhancing your data, analytics and insights capability easily.

Practical steps you can use

Seek out the people in your organisation who are interested in data and analytics.

Normally you will find them in finance or IT.

Give these individuals or teams a specific question to answer each week.

For example – tell me more about the customers that are leaving us:

• Profile

• Demographics

• How long have they been a customer

• Claims history

• Payment/credit history

• Customer service complaints/customer experience scores 

Get them to present this to the relevant Executive.

Ask them to detail what they’ve learnt and what would they do differently.

Now it’s time to think about your data strategy

As you start to build momentum, write a list of all the strategic and operational questions you want to answer.  This should create a pipeline of questions that can be investigated leading to recommendations to the Executives on how these insights should change strategy and operations. 

The changes should then be tracked and monitored through your regular key metrics reporting to understand how these shifts have positively impacted business results.

Need a data champion to kick things off?

From finding the data champions within your business, to identifying the key data outputs best suited to help your business grow into a smarter, stronger operator, reach out to me. My expert experience, passion for data analytics and team of data and marketing professionals may be just the kick-start your company needs to grow with data.

More data equals more opportunity?

A good data strategy will help you look at your business to identify outputs that will help you deliver.

More data, more opportunity
In 2020 we’re in an amazing position to understand our customers and business functions like never before. And it all comes down to the sheer volume of data at our fingertips.

It starts with strategy
Whether it’s via cash flow reporting or CRM segmentation, every organisation holds a significant amount of customer, member, consumer and employee data. But analysing this can seem like a giant task. Where to start? What’s important and what’s not? That’s where a data strategy comes into play.

Which data matters most?
A data strategy will look at your business objectives then explore data outputs that will help you achieve these. For example, if you’re moving away from a product led approach to a more customer focused organisation, data based on your key customer segments - which are growing, which are profitable and how to mobilise the organisation around this, will form the basis of your data strategy. If, on the other hand, your business strategy is focussed around transitioning from an office based salesforce to a mobile model, important data outputs could include facilities and cost driver analysis.

A clear focus cuts through data clutter
So to get it right, you need to start from the beginning. Once you can define your business strategy, you can define the data points you should be exploring and how to utilise this data to understand and then change the way you drive your business.

Data strategy health check
At a top level, you can get a clear idea if you’re using data effectively by answering the following questions. If you’re unsure, you may need a hand with your data strategy.

• What products/services are profitable?

• What customers are profitable?

• What customers are likely to leave you?

• What is the profitability of your business units?

An accurate understanding of these questions leads to:

• Improved customer experience

• A more tailored customer approach, ultimately results in higher revenue

• An ability to optimise the cost base

• Utilise your spend data to understand, forecast and optimise the costs in the organisation

• Increased productivity across the value chain

• Improve the sales and service approach to drive efficiency in key business processes.

Bringing in a data expert

Data is measurable and accountable, allowing you to optimise your strategy and operations through real insights and clear direction. It can just be a bit of a handful to determine what data you should be investigating and how. If you need advice on where to start reach out to Jo Hands or an expert from our data team on whiteark@whiteark.com.au