Helping Businesses Return to Health and Emerge Stronger

Author – Asad Mahmood, Principal Solution Architect, NTT DATA Business Solutions UK.

Firstly, I hope you are all well and coping with the challenges we are currently facing. I hope that you and your loved ones remain healthy and we are able to turn the tide on this virus in the very near future. My thoughts and prayers are with all those that are affected by this disease.

As of last week, we developed a series of offerings to help customers combat the impacts of COVID-19 on their businesses. These solutions span different parts of the organisation.

I have been involved in the design of our “bring focus with a free analytics workshop”. This along with many of our other offerings are completely free for customers and intended to help them lessen the business impact of COVID-19 and help their businesses emerge stronger.

The essence of data has always been to provide effective and relevant information to business users, which in turn allows them to take necessary decisions and ensuing actions. This has been a well-established principle and there are countless studies that point to the efficacy of such an approach. This has become significantly more important in the face of unprecedented change and uncertainty.

In a time of social and financial distress, we cannot afford to be slow, indecisive or ill-informed – enter analytics.

Our 1 – day virtual workshop

This 1-day virtual workshop is designed to discuss and uncover business imperatives preoccupying the decision makers and their associated impact on the business. Once understood, we will work with customers to refine our understanding and rapidly develop analytical prototypes to represent potential solutions. Once approved by the business, we will seek to productionise these as expeditiously as we can and deliver insight to the relevant users. Whilst the productive deployment of such solutions is not included as part of this initial engagement, we will strive to provide meaningful and representative prototypes within the scope of this 1 day engagement.

As part of this pragmatic approach, we will be leveraging the customer’s existing investments in analytics: BI technologies and Data Stores. There are no software prerequisites.

Having delivered these sessions for customers over the course of last week, here are some of the outcomes we have identified. Clearly, these will vary from business-to-business but we do expect common themes to emerge from these workshops:

We adopt Design Thinking techniques to define and refine our understanding of business priorities. Once identified, we draw on our analytical expertise to design appropriate solutions. These prototypes are shared with customers to gain validation and drive further iterations.

Armed with this information, customers can proceed with clarity and confidence to ensure they circumvent the new challenges that they are facing and equally, capitalise on the new opportunities presented to them.

If you would like to take advantage of our free virtual analytics workshop, then please register your interest here.