Death by Data?

How can organizations, including SMEs, leverage the confluence of ABC (AI, big data, and cloud)?

- By Raju Chellam

It started innocently enough: A request for one simple dashboard. The team delivered a masterpiece—complete with drilldowns, trend lines and a predictive model that claimed to calculate the CEO’s mood. Soon, every department wanted their own version. HR added a maroon Mood Monitor. Legal wanted a chocolate-colored Compliance Chart. Logistics asked for an indigo Inventory Index. Sales sought a red Reality Response.

The result? By the next quarter, the dashboard had 14 widgets and required four servers to run. Meetings turned into interpretive art sessions: “If the blue line intersects the red line when indigo is high, what will be the CEO's mood?” the CFO asked. “Is the chocolate-colored line inversely proportional to the maroon line's rise?” Finally, the CEO asked: “To hell with all the lines. Can you tell me if we made money in the last quarter?” Silence from the team, the app, the cloud. Why? The server was busy calculating the impact of lunar phases on procurement.

If that anecdote made you smirk, these statistics should make you work: Forrester says 33% of data analysts waste more than 40% of their workday just cleaning data before it can be used for strategic decision-making. This creates a significant problem for employees because trying to pull out the most valuable data is akin throwing a net into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and hoping to pull out a fish.

AI adds more complexity to the mix. “As more B2B buyers adopt GenAI tools to gather faster insights, marketing, sales and product leaders are facing intense pressure to integrate GenAI into their go-to-market applications to keep up,” Forrester reports. “Yet, 19% of buyers using AI apps feel less confident in their purchasing decisions due to inaccurate or unreliable information provided by GenAI.”