What value have you got locked away in your data cupboard?
For decades, businesses have been recording and storing huge amounts of data – often a significant burden on top of regular business activities. Despite spending time and resources on data storage, many businesses struggle to capitalise on these troves of data. Despite the recent emergence of a variety of AI and Machine Learning technologies, many businesses are still not realising the value of their data assets. Project-based businesses in particular are sitting on large amounts of carefully collected data about thousands of projects, going back decades in some cases. So how can you realise the value of your business data?
You may not know what your data can do
You may know how to deliver projects, how to record project data and you may even have developed non-AI methods of analysing and drawing insights from that data. Despite these insights, few project professionals understand the full capability of their data. Even the most tech-literate can fail to see the value of the data sets they are sitting on. Consider Google, which was initially utilising all of its search data to improve the quality of its algorithm. It took years (and the bursting of the dotcom bubble) for Google executives to realise that what they had was a valuable trove of data for predicting people’s behaviour, data that they could interpret to improve the quality of their advertising offering. It’s important to keep an open mind about the kinds of insights that can be drawn from your business data, and the value to the business these insights might provide.
Think like a machine
Human beings have a particular way of looking at data, and significant limitations when it comes to interpreting it. What may seem like an incomprehensible mess of data, may be a perfect training set for the right machine learner. Too often, businesses are embarrassed about the state of their data, so they avoid reaching out to AI companies, convinced that what they have is simply too fragmented to be useful.
Don’t go it alone
Finally, it’s important to realise your internal limitations, and seek the skills of AI experts to facilitate your digital transformation. You could spend years trying to develop the AI capability to make sense of, and get value from, your business data. Or, there may be products already in the market which can transform your business today. At Octant AI, we have developed a product which predicts time and cost overrun up to 30% sooner. We have already started helping project-based businesses to derive real value out of their existing data sets, improving the business bottom line by up to 10%. Project based businesses are capitalising on data sets that until now have only cost them money to store.
Could you be next?
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