By: Bane Hunter

Abundant real-time data is now more readily available to business owners than ever. However, according to Bane Hunter, many fail to fully leverage this data. This failure to properly leverage their data leaves them missing out on an ever-growing number of opportunities and exposes them to being overshadowed by increasingly stiff market competition.

Hunter is a digital transformation and technology-based outcomes specialist. The business intelligence exec knows better than most how important data is for today’s businesses. To demonstrate, he explains in detail below how organizations can leverage real-time data for informed decision-making, invaluable new insights, improved project outcomes, and more.

It’s a demonstration that begins with a closer look at examples of real-time data before exploring how this data allows businesses to gain all-new degrees of insight. Before wrapping up, Bane Hunter also touches on how organizations can leverage real-time data to drastically improve project outcomes, ensuring on-time and on-budget delivery every time.

What are some examples of real-time data?

Real-time data sources vary from industry to industry. Within technology and online, application activity and digital marketing analytics are prime examples. That means things like smartphone app usage and search engine advertising results on the basic spectrum of data availability. Meanwhile, within healthcare, for example, wearable medical devices and active scans are a growing source of often hugely insightful real-time data.

Of course, data from online analytics—and that collected from people’s medical and other wearables, among countless additional sources—varies massively in its usability. However, all of it provides at least a degree of insight that businesses and other organizations can use for decision-making, improving their products and services, and more.

Countless other real-time data sources also exist, all with their respective uses. ‘Internet of Things’ or IoT sensors, web server logs, website clickstreams, and similar sources are examples of valuable real-time data sources. That said, the complexity and richness of data availability are growing daily across many sources. 

How does real-time data allow businesses to gain new insight?

Until relatively recently, collecting data about customers, patients, or members of the public was a long and often laborious process. In years gone by, efforts to collect data, while long and laborious, would often leave data analysts seeking more in terms of quantity, quality, validity and timeliness. The web, smartphones, and wearable tech have made data collection much more straightforward, but that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data collection and applicability. 

These and similar technologies and software have also enabled the same data to be collected and real-time analyzed. And therein lies the most significant advantage – no delay. That gives businesses and other organizations access to instant, real-time, around-the-clock insights that don’t have time to become outdated or otherwise regrettably prove fruitless.

New insight isn’t just important from an internal perspective, either. It’s also a fantastic way to ensure businesses stay ahead of their competitors. That’s especially true of those who may not yet have realized the power of real-time data, offering a significant marketplace advantage to those who have.

What data insights are most valuable for decision-making?

Real-time data’s instantaneous, around-the-clock delivery is worth nothing if businesses can’t, don’t, or won’t capitalize on it. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now making the interpretation of this data usable in business terms. Simple underutilization is also a problem. For example, real-time data is widely used strictly for analytics and marketing. However, when instead viewed as a chiefly decision-making tool, despite being incredibly valuable, it remained widely underutilized unless there was a conglomerate with the resources and talent to act on it. Even then, the process could be lengthy. This is also changing rapidly; now, with AI, smaller organizations, if appropriately structured and fed access to the right data, can enact decisions at a competitive level. 

Therefore, organizations of all shapes and sizes can use real-time data for decision-making. That means capitalizing on data to support everything from day-to-day processes and services to product and new feature development. From a processes perspective, almost any data point can provide valuable insights when leveraged correctly.

Meanwhile, user data centered on how customers employ a company’s products or services, for example, is often the most valuable in the latter two instances. Elsewhere, demographic data, in particular, now frequently proves invaluable in determining new business opportunities or threats and weaknesses by granting the ability to analyze shifts in trends over set periods.

Can leveraging real-time data noticeably improve project outcomes?

Absolutely. Whether streamlining day-to-day operations or making a product more marketable, real-time data has a massive reach. With that, its ability to improve project outcomes is broad and widely proven.

Take improving project outcomes as a specific example. Leveraging real-time data allows project managers and other executives central to operations to make more confident, data-led decisions, realize potentially massive cost savings, and increase their team or teams’ productivity. The result is more successful projects, all delivered on or below budget, on scope, and on time every time.

More confident decision-making stems from real-time data’s ability to perform multiple roles. That includes serving as a benchmark while removing any subjective elements from decision-making processes.

Accordingly, fewer mistakes prevent project managers from unnecessarily burning through their budgets. Therefore, as Hunter has been saying for years and at times being misunderstood, data is the new oil/gold rush of this generation. Those with access to the right data, of sufficient quantity and quality, and made available before their competitors access it (both historical and current) will become one of the new titans of the AI age.

Published by: Holy Minoza