Text by Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital
This is incredible, but in the middle of 2021, companies are still experiencing the belated and increasingly anachronistic dilemma of how to transform data into effective market intelligence. Data that materialize in differentiated, competitive and highly profitable strategic actions.
Never before have companies had so much data at their disposal. Even in the face of the limitations of privacy laws, the volume of data available remains gigantic. And data is like seeing through: they reveal what is not always apparent and this Mother Diná nature gives companies the condition to make decisions and create products, strategies or business models that put them at an advantage over the competition. Or simply in front of themselves. Anyway, moving forward and developing.
All the resources to make this happen are on the table. They are at hand and can be used. But, often inexplicably for the current times, a relevant part of the companies, even those with all the conditions and resources to overcome this, are unable to get out of this quagmire. Since there is no real quagmire at all.
Except the one they create for themselves.
Below, I list 5 silly reasons why companies don’t turn this problem into an old legacy of the past.
Decentralized overload – being the volume of data available overwhelming, what companies insist on doing is delegating autonomy to each area to build their own independent data structures. It is a decentralized overload. Since there are numerous platforms and software available to centralize everything. The omniscient management of consumer and market data is not only possible, but it will unlock the whole mess, allowing companies to extract the best and greatest value from what this information contains. And, on top of them, they can build their differentiated marketing and business strategies.
Lack of priority and focus – there is a monumental corporate laziness reigning in contemporary companies on this subject, which results in data being crammed into useless files and mismanaged, or not managed at all. Lack of priority and focus are the reasons why this is so, because resources for this not to be so are more than available.
Lack of resources is not an excuse – the lack of resources, which is what most companies that have problems in the area claim they have, is not always, in fact, the real problem. There is such a lack of priority and focus from above and leaders and managers preoccupied with other things, in addition to a huge lethargy to allocate them in such a strategic area as the transformation of data into actions that generate differentiated businesses and competitive. The first culprit of this is the CEO. But C-level leaders from various areas share this management negligence. Anyway, pretty dumb.
The quarter challenge – one of the reasons this chain of neglect and lack of focus occurs is the quarter challenge. For data to be transformed into concrete competitive intelligence, it takes some time. It is not an action of days or weeks. We are often talking about months. And months is a long way off for managers, who can continue investing in short-term solutions that generate more immediate measurable results, but do not build any competitive differential for the medium and long term. I want my bonus in the bank, guys!
Ignorance of technologies and resources – finally, there is another laziness: ignorance of existing technological possibilities. It costs too much for leaders to learn and understand the new. They have more to do. What is new here, it should be understood, are the existing and accessible technological platforms for intelligent data management, with a view to concretely transforming them into strategic and business gains for companies. Willful ignorance, I would add, since it is not possible, nowadays, for any leader to claim ignorance in order not to incorporate any technological resource at his disposal to make his company grow. Quite frankly.
Thus, the problem is likely to continue and companies will continue to miss out on rich competitive opportunities. For 5 of the silliest and laziest reasons we could imagine.
Text by Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital
Article published by Innovation Insider.
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