How to become a data- and insights-driven business

It sounds crazy: many enterprises collect vast amounts of data about their operations and software that could provide the insights needed to jumpstart their businesses, and yet they fail to make full use of that data due to organizational and technological fragmentation.

That’s a huge missed opportunity. Companies that want to grow revenues and manage costs through modern services architectures must leverage digital insights throughout their organization to fully succeed. That said, there is a right way to collect, disseminate, and use business and technical data.

Just as the DevOps movement can bring competitive advantage by breaking down the walls between developer and operations teams, democratizing a unified view of data and insights across the organization is the key to both improved IT productivity and delivering a better digital customer experience.

Driving leadership with digital insights

That’s one of the key takeaways from a new Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership study commissioned by New Relic: “Drive Leadership with Digital Insights for All.” (Read the full study here, or learn even more in a new on-demand webinar with guest James McCormick, a Forrester principal analyst serving customers insights professionals, and New Relic Product Marketing Principal James Nguyen.)

The study notes that by 2021, insight-driven businesses will be taking a whopping $1.6 trillion in annual revenues from companies that deny the importance of digital transformation and evolution. So how can you make sure you’re on the right side of that massive transfer of wealth?

Well, similar to how both development and operations teams benefit from access to the same application data, at a higher level, both marketing and IT leaders need to be looking at the same information across applications, infrastructure, and business operations.

Fortunately, the report reveals that much of that data is already being captured. On average, enterprises capture more than a dozen different types of data, from application and mobile performance data to infrastructure and unstructured internal data. The problem is that departmental silos, misaligned priorities, and a confusing array of tools can stymie efforts to make that information—and the insights it can generate—available and valuable throughout the organization.

The power of democratizing data

As explained in the study:

Few enterprises excel in democratizing access to data, tools, and insights—meaning that  learnings captured in one department may fail to get contextualized by learnings captured in another department.

The solution is a comprehensive application performance monitoring (APM) platform that can monitor all the performance issues that are likely to impact the customer, via applications, APIs, services, and infrastructure, including virtual and physical components. Pulling all that information together creates the single source of truth that enterprises need to use their data to derive broader insights about the business as a whole.

According to the study, companies that run multiple data types through their performance-monitoring platform claim:

• Better understanding of how app performance impacts the rest of the business
• Increased employee productivity by improving alignment with business goals
• Improved digital customer experience through better performing applications and websites

It all adds up to building competitive advantage by optimizing cultural, operational, and technological factors to enable digital insights to drive the business.