What does it mean to be a data-first company in practice?

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By Ihab El Ghazzawi , Director of Global Messaging, Emerging Technologies and Thought Leadership, Dell Technologies

Many different types of organisations, from a craft beer supplier to multinational FMCG companies, are using data in ingenious ways, to answer big questions and make new discoveries more quickly. It’s not happening on a homogenous scale, but there are pockets of excellence everywhere.

Here we offer a glimpse of best practices, across two highly regulated sectors – healthcare and financial services – as well as an emerging sector – smart connected vehicles – to show how data is transforming business, and therefore, the customer experience.

Hyper-connected health
A few years ago, connected health was seen as the holy grail, something desperately how to save australia number in whatsapp sought and needed but seemingly elusive. Not so today. The industry has made great strides in connecting physicians to data, patients to healthcare providers, and practices to networks, with the goal of delivering more integrated care that saves more lives.

With edge and IoT devices, healthcare leaders are identifying opportunities to gain actionable insights at the source so that responses can be faster and more confident. However, getting patient data to the right people at the right time remains a challenge. Part of the difficulty comes from a lack of integration and interoperability. New technology vendors entering the healthcare space continue to build closed IoT devices that obstruct data sharing. That said, there are examples of data excellence in healthcare.

One of them is Gustave Roussy in France, the leading European cancer centre, committed to placing innovation at the heart of a human, scientific and technological revolution in the fight against cancer. Thanks to a holistic IT transformation, the time it takes to convert data into clinical value is decreasing, allowing Gustave Roussy to break new ground in research by leveraging AI to develop faster diagnosis, more personalised treatment and less invasive medicine. Patients’ genetic information (DNA, RNA and whole exome) together with clinical diagnoses provide further valuable data that can be used to improve future outcomes for both the patient and the wider population.

Another is McLaren Racing , a motorsports racing team that has managed an extraordinary pivot and applied its expertise in using real-time data captured by over 300 sensors on a single car to craft strategies for competing in F1 races around the world, in order to improve patient care and enable people to live healthier lives. McLaren Applied is analyzing the data to identify the onset of disease earlier and predict patient outcomes more accurately. It recently partnered with a British pharmaceutical company to monitor the recovery of stroke victims and people suffering from severe arthritis, using smart sensors and data analytics. Previously, doctors could only track a patient’s health when they physically visited the clinic. Now however, they are able to perform these analyses in a virtual manner.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but it represents the immense, and as yet untapped, potential for innovation within the confines of a heavily regulated market. Consider what can be achieved when industry and government work in unison to make these regulations fit for the data age.

Connected Financial Services
The financial services sector is arguably the most data-intensive sector in the global economy. Banks preside over vast amounts of customer data, from ATM deposits/withdrawals, point-of-sale purchases, online payments, customer profile data…etc.

There is a real opportunity to turn this sea of ​​data into powerful, actionable insights. For example, imagine you are a start-up bank with a vision to lend to individuals with a low credit rating or startups in need of a loan. By leveraging data, you can better predict risks and offer tailored financial packages that help businesses and individuals become financially empowered, without sacrificing your margins. You would become a beacon in the industry and your peers would seek to replicate your success.

The financial services industry’s pockets would quickly be transformed, as players with bold new ideas and the means to make them a reality emerged from the margins. Legacy financial institutions would seek to transform themselves at the same time, bringing data out of silos and turning ideas into vehicles for innovation.

The Australian Securities Exchange is a fascinating example of a financial services organisation harnessing the power of emerging technologies to evolve. Over the past three years it has embarked on a successful infrastructure modernisation programme. As part of this, it is exploring distributed ledgers (Blockchain) to create a private, permissioned network that will make Australia’s clearing, settlement and financial markets more secure and transparent.

At the heart of this move was a focus on data. According to Dan Chesterman, CIO of the Australian Securities Exchange , Blockchain will provide a harmonized data model, available in near real-time, but with privacy and confidentiality assured. So if they need to review a stock transaction, for example, they will be able to immediately access all the data they need, without having to reconcile different versions of the data that have been replicated across different parts of their infrastructure.

Connected vehicles
Cars are no longer just mechanical vehicles, they are computers, they are mobility ecosystems, and they are equipped with hundreds of sensors that can be used to obtain all kinds of valuable data, as Otonomo knows very well.

Using data from connected cars, Otonomo has built a data platform that enables the innovation of new car and car-adjacent services focused on driver safety, traffic management, smart cities, fleet operations, innovative insurance, parking, concierge services, and more. It collects, cleans, and normalizes vast amounts of data that can be queried with smart questions, to yield smart answers.

The benefits are manifold. For example, insights can be used to help vehicle companies strengthen customer relationships. In the distant past, these companies enjoyed a monopoly. They owned the gas stations and repair shops. Today, there are fewer touchpoints with customers. As such, these ties are being challenged.

However, even this can be remedied with data. Car manufacturers no longer operate as a monopoly, but they have access to a wealth of data about cars that can be used to provide new services, from predictive maintenance alerts and on-demand car washes to parking detection and roadside assistance.

With data platforms like Otonomo, as the volume of data grows, so do the opportunities to put that data to work in powerful new ways. The only thing that limits the potential of data is our imagination.

Of course, there are more factors to overcome to put self-driving cars on every road, but data remains the central ingredient to making these vehicles safe and ubiquitous. Using computer vision algorithms, sensor fusion, decision-making, and vehicle control, autonomous vehicles will process data inputs just like a human would, to recognize cars, people, signs, lane markers, and everything else seen on a road.

Data – the key to unlocking the potential of human-machine partnership
While the financial services and healthcare industries are transforming to better utilize data, the connected and autonomous vehicle industry is all about the power of data and is taking older, more conservative parts of the automotive industry along for the ride.

In fact, across all industries, data no longer just supports the business; it is the business. The increasing value of data is driving organizations to retain more information so they can explore new opportunities to increase customer loyalty, introduce new services to the market, and compete more effectively.

As the volume, variety and velocity of data grows at a rapid pace, all organizations will need to develop robust data management strategies. In this decade of data, use cases will abound. CIOs will need to help the broader enterprise connect the dots so they can see the prodigious opportunity ahead.

As Jordon Howard, a millennial social welfare strategist and delegate at the Institute for the Future and Dell Technologies’ Human-Machine Partnership workshop, once said, “Many of the complex problems facing society today are rooted in waste, inefficiency, and just plain not knowing—like how to keep certain genes from mutating. What if we could solve these problems by partnering more closely with machines and using the masses of data they provide to make breakthroughs at great speed? As a team, we can aim higher, dream bigger, and achieve more.”