With the global economy set to rebound, recent headlines here have been dominated by optimistic news of innovation centre launches and shifting business strategies towards sustainability and circularity of resources. The idea behind these business strategies is the need to poise organisations’ readiness to ride the post-pandemic economic recovery wave.
Are we truly ready to ride this wave? Recently, Singapore lost APAC’s top spot on the 2021 Global Innovation Index to Korea, despite the Singapore government’s priorities to build stronger digital capabilities and drive new areas of economic growth so the nation will rise in the digital economy.
To thrive in the digital economy, enterprises need to put data at the heart of innovation.
In 2020, more than 64 zettabytes of data were generated and consumed globally. Incumbents like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google alone have access to about 1.2 million terabytes of data.
Smaller enterprises are also realising the advantages that leveraging data can bring to their businesses, making it a central asset that offers them a significant competitive edge. In fact, more than 90% of business executives believe data analytics are important for their enterprises to remain performant.
The promise of data-first business strategy and culture
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According to Alteryx-commissioned IDC “Toward Analytic Automation in Asia Pacific” study, 56% of enterprises with a data-first business strategy and culture are more likely to outperform their peers in cost reduction. The same sentiments are shared with more than a quarter (28%) of businesses better positioned to drive business model innovation and 12% to drive market expansion.
With the true promise of having a data-centric approach to fuel organisational growth and opportunities, why is only a handful (20%) of Singaporean enterprises deemed to be experts in this area?
As Singapore is a highly-skilled yet small and expensive market, companies require economies of scale and market growth to thrive. Unfortunately, they reported major analytical gaps existing between business priorities and business performance. Notably, the aforementioned cost reduction and market expansion, with the addition of revenue generation, are where the gaps lie.
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The looming storm to overcome
Enterprises need to build capabilities to derive business value from data analytics. Executives across the region currently struggle with hard to use analytical tools, lack of timely access to data and shortage of workforce with adequate data literacy skills.
Furthermore, these challenges are exacerbated by increased complexity and organisational demands for data analytics to be delivered at greater speed and scale.
Only 25% of employees in Singapore believe they are fully prepared to leverage data effectively, while almost five in 10 employees choose to follow their instinct over data-driven insights when making decisions.
Soon entering the workforce, a mere one in 10 graduates stated that they are prepared to deal with data at a workplace. This workplace data-related stress is causing companies to lose an average of more than five working days per employee, and an approximate US$5.1 billion in Singapore annually.
Many enterprises are approaching this storm with a two-pronged approach: to hire more data science and analytics workers, and upskill the current workforce to fill this skills gap. However, this is no easy feat.
With the skill demands skyrocketing globally, Singapore is no stranger to the critically low supply of these skilled workers. To keep pace with the emerging tech and technological advancements, there is an imminent need for the region’s digital workers to create large-scale data models and database technology. This trend is expected to surge by 34% in the next five years.
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The key to unlocking businesses’ greatest assets
That said, it is not too late for businesses to turn the tide. A human-centric, analytics automation platform can unlock data analytics, data science and process automation with a few clicks of a button.
Established organisations, such as NTUC Income and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, have modernised legacy work cultures to eliminate mundane data preparation tasks that were embedded in spreadsheets, empowered traditionally non-data skilled employees to perform citizen-led analytics and created ideal data architectures to drive quicker and more valuable data-driven insights.
As data growth is forecasted to continue through 2024 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26%, Singaporean organisations should look to improve the data processes associated with their existing data analytics by employing analytics automation with an eye for increasing the scale of their data and the insights that can be generated from data.
Today’s integrated self-service analytics and data science solutions have proven to simplify and broaden the accessibility of data, analytics and data science to everyone regardless of department functions.
The widespread implementation of AI and machine learning in these sophisticated platforms has made deriving insight-driven outcomes possible for any employee, even those without a coding background.
Through a simple self-service experience that engages the workforce and accelerates a data-first culture and business strategy, businesses can now unlock the true potential of their greatest assets – data, workforce and processes – to outperform in key business priorities and supercharge their economic recovery journey.
Julian Quinn is the senior vice president for APJ at Alteryx.
Photo: Unsplash
