Blog: Data as a Business Disruptor, for Better or Worse

Disrupt! It’s a word we hear all the time. This new widget or that newfangled technology is disrupting an industry that’s never seen such disruption. It’s easy to suggest the term “disrupting” is getting rather disruptive, but it’s important to know how and when something can radically change a business.

Companies are finding out that data and specifically big data can spur sweeping change, especially when it can generate greater insight and improve current processes, leading to more optimized marketing and sales performance, and better fulfilling customer expectations. Or even better, when it enables an ability to confidently predict the future, such as the future status of a transaction, future satisfaction of a customer, future unplanned outages (thereby enabling a pre-emptive planned outage), and much more.

A few examples of when data becomes the disruptor, for better or worse:

That Card on Your Keychain

Consumer loyalty cards rack up points for customer discounts, to be sure, but mostly they track your spending habits and optimize marketing and sales initiatives. But what about directly alerting your customers of product recalls because they used a loyalty card? Neat, huh? Even a gym membership tag helps track gym usage so the facility can appropriately staff during peak times.

Keep Workers Working

A train shipping parts to an automotive assembly plant must cross between Canada and into the U.S.  If the customs documents don’t make it through in time, an assembly line at the plant could screech to a halt while union-contracted workers continue to get paid. Even a one-hour delay can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime.

Testing Out

What if you couldn’t start a new job because the medical lab processing your pre-hire drug test didn’t know the transfer failed? Even more critically, what if your bloodwork gets mishandled or doesn’t come back in a timely manner? A modern IT infrastructure features a reliable community management solution to keep transfers moving, especially when labs send out thousands of such results a day.

Building Blocks

Consider a city’s multimillion-dollar construction project that gets delayed because the massive CAD files were not securely managed or shared with the appropriate government agencies. Even contract procurement for permits, RFPs, and legal reviews must go through the proper compliance procedures. And you need the audit trail to prove it.

All of these information flows – from person-to-person file sharing to moving information from a data lake into a data processing platform – must be secured. Lock up that data and streamline its integration for easy analytics and digestion. It could be your company’s disruptor for better, not for worse.