The power of analytics is driving business enterprises to fuel complete digital transformation to create industry-leading customer experiences. But mere use of data does not guarantee any success. Businesses have been thrown out of the race just because they were not able to deploy data in an intelligent way. In the long run, organisations who can best analyse will be the most competitive and impactful. Taking "smart" analytics technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex algorithms and natural language processing to gain an edge to further augment their analytical abilities, catalyse digital transformation and drive organisational change in their enterprise operations.

The secret to unlock the success from promising technologies lies in the strategic AI adoption. Data Analytics is often shrouded in mystery and hype, or the black box that seldom reaches beyond specialised data workers. Credit to the underlying complexities, the focus lies in the technology itself, rather how people beyond analytics interact with data and benefit from them.

In addition to making analytics an easy task for deployment, there is an urgent need to focus on the importance of trust. Organisations and the people running them will not use smart analytics technologies if they cannot understand and trust them. The trust factor needs to be there for the mass availability and transformative change that smart technologies can enable. The process begins with ensuring fundamental trust exists in deploying data and its surrounding technologies for an organisation's path ahead. This process will assist employees to understand how to deploy these smart technologies in a quest to improve their productivity and insights.

Building a Data Driven Approach

Making people to buy a data-driven approach is imperative to embrace smart technologies within an organisation. People must believe that data is the fundamental necessity to a company's value and success. Organisations who are better equipped to handle data will march ahead than those who are not. In cases where an organisation offers resistance to deploy data for decision-making, barriers exist to embrace new technologies that aid analysis.

How can an organisation create a culture of analytics? First steps first, an organisation needs to focus on making data widely available for its employees to use and study insights. Organisations require making analytics capabilities available at every level to reinforce the importance of making every decision data-driven.

This behaviour can be reinforced by bringing data and analytics straight into decision-making meetings, where employees and change makers question and adopt smart technologies in real-time. Organisations need to measure their data deployment and understand its impact with an executive support to reinforce its importance.

The Aura of Smart Analytics

People are sceptical to adopt analytics as they have limited information and knowledge about these smart technologies. These technologies are relatively new and even businesses are still in the learning phase. The key pillars to adoption lie in imparting education and transparency.

With rapid changes in technology, algorithms and models become more sophisticated, and increasingly incomprehensible. What business and its people need is "explainable AI to understand the operations and logic behind the complex codes. There is a need to decode the black box where smart technologies can expose their inner workings, and simultaneously help acknowledge and avoid biases that exist when new minds are exposed to analytics. This combination will be a win-win situation for both the world's machine and humans.

Understanding Smart Technologies

People will not have the faith to trust if they believe that it may endanger their livelihood. There is an increased fear that these smart technologies may replace humans with automation doing away with routine work as of now. Instead of living in a constant fear, people should view smart analytics that will help them perform better, instead of a threat which will replace them. Smart analytics if deployed efficiently can help employees and change makers make better decisions to improve their organisation's efficiency, personalise the customer experience, automate and differentiate versus competitors.

Promote Data Literacy

Tools and technology are the precursors of the greater movement, which can be put into the best use only when data is deployed in an intelligent manner. Organisations need to understand the impact of wrong recommendations from a smart machine that will lead to wasted resources and bad decisions. Data literacy, people development and critical thinking are the change factors in this scenario.

Business enterprises need to invest in promoting analytics knowledge among their employees through courses, seminars and workshops. Another radical movement can be when children are exposed and allowed to lean data and analytics from an earlier age. This provides the crucial familiarity with data and creative skills needed to work with it at a very early stage. When smart analytics are integrated with education at an earlier stage, organisation will have the ready workforce as when their analytics dependability increase.

The Path Towards Change and Adoption

Change is uncomfortable, especially when there is a shift towards smart technologies. The bridge from discomfort to success will come with education and an approachable step that business enterprises need to take towards smart technologies.