How data-driven solutions can accomplish better results?
A famous quote goes thus, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is true today more than ever. Today enterprises regardless of their business vertical want solutions that can be quantified in terms of how many man-hours it reduces, how many customers it can acquire, how much time and money it can save and so on. Without the quantitative data no value can be ascribed to any product, solution or service in the software arena.
Business software applications have gone through a lot of changes. In the not so distant past software was delivered to the client where it was installed on some desktop or server setup. This assisted the client in simplifying business processes by taking the burden of workload and speeding up data processing. But beyond that it could not make sense of the data that it was processing and thus deriving meaningful insights was next to impossible.
The entry of Software as a Service (SaaS) into this domain was a game changer. It took what was best about the legacy software solution and made it even better. Since the software was being rented it did not burden companies with the high upfront cost. Now it was genuinely possible to integrate different software suites and apply analytics and business intelligence to extract more information.
Today it is the era of cloud-based computing solutions and data analytics. All this can seamlessly collate, corroborate, integrate and visualize data on a grand scale to help business enterprises run more efficiently. Software solutions can today capture business insights on the fly, take swift decisions, and deploy specific actions to attain quantifiable results.
But still there were some fundamental issues like it could not make sense of what the data was all about and it still needed active human intervention. But the explosion of big data in the last couple of years meant that software solutions need to be smarter, more agile and have the attributes of artificial intelligence embedded within them. In short, the software applications are expected to be extremely data-driven in a constantly evolving world.
All this leaves the human masters to concentrate on what they do best – concentrate on the bigger picture and take large-scale decisions. The modern data-driven solutions can systematically mine data using high speed algorithms that can crawl your own servers or external databases accessible via cloud infrastructure to provide enterprise-grade decisions. They can predict the business process outcomes with a high degree of success and can prescribe the future course of action. Software applications can seamlessly work with businesses processes and improve them on a consistent basis.
This change is not an evolutionary trend but more of a revolutionary occurrence. It is, by its very nature a disruptive development. The events leading to this kind of a disruption could be the changes that we are seeing in the domains of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud). SMAC today is rightly leading business innovation in diverse industry verticals around the globe.
Traditional software will always exist but the exigencies of doing business in the days ahead will put unprecedented pressure on software solutions to deliver more. Hence the data-driven solutions are here to stay and assist enterprises in every way possible by amalgamating data and subject matter expertise to provide highly scalable offerings to meet increasing customer demands, and more.
