By Surobhi Lahiri, Principal Consultant, TalentSprint
Data driven analytics, innovation and decision making has made its foray into businesses across sectors. The key enablers in this rapid and disruptive data led transformation have been wide scale data generation, advanced algorithms and high capacity computational power and storage. Data has successfully revolutionized every business and the early adopters are seeing the maximal growth and gains.
Six key archetypes of data led disruption across industries were identified in a McKinsey Global Institute analysis. They found that data driven discovery is the key archetype of disruption in the life sciences, pharma, material sciences and technology domains; Uncorrelated or Orthogonal data is a significant disruptor in the insurance, healthcare and human resources domains; Radical personalization is driving disruptions in the retail, media and education domains; Wide scale data integration capabilities are the disrupting factors in the banking and public sectors; Hyperscale, real-time matching based disruptions are significant in transportation and logistics and automotives; Enhanced decision making is the main disruptive element in Smart Cities, healthcare and insurance industries.
Here are some of the most powerful examples of the data driven disruptions that are bringing fascinating changes to the industrial landscape.
Healthcare
In the Healthcare industry, insights from patient centric data analytics have led to improvements in patient care, cost optimization and better outcomes. Valuable information is extracted from patient care records, prescriptions, diagnostic tests, insurance claims, health monitoring machines and medical research documents. At Apollo Hospital, Chennai, data analytics led infection control measures in the Microbiology Department were adopted. Their analytics solution utilized the clinical
information related to communication of disease and infection surveillance patterns and merged it with the microbiological, laboratory and antibiotic data. Rapid automated notification and collaboration between members of the infection control team aided in determining whether potential or real outbreaks were serious and replaced older, manual systems. The data analytics dashboard developed with the Microsoft Business Intelligence tool yielded beneficial results and increased the efficiency of the team.
Banking
Banks have shifted their data processing from on-premises hardware to the cloud or hosted facilities. This has led to an improvement in addressing gaps in costs, skills and infrastructure management for big data analytics. Businesses are now able to access large volumes of data from an integrated data hub, that is available in such cloud data warehouses. This aids in the faster transformation of data into intelligent insights and leads to a better customer service. Consequently, data integration is increasing the revenue growth for banks through new insights from various volumes of data coming from different sources and formats. The Western Union Company, a global leader in cross- border, cross currency money transfers, has integrated all its data into a unified platform for data analytics and achieved more than 29 transactions a second by delivering personalized customer experience solutions.
Transportation and Logistics
The transportation industry is a huge, fragmented, volatile and complex industry that faces issues in optimizing expenditures, schedules and routes. A real-time matching application that matches loads to transportation capacity using concurrent data analytics, market indices modeling and digital collaboration, improves the workflow and provides an optimal solution for cost, performance, convenience and asset utilization. The practical benefits are obtained through informed decisions based on the fair price point according to current market trends. PostBidShip is a digital freight platform that uses real-time
market information and provides rapid intelligent analytics, thus aiding informed decision-making regarding freights.
The logistics industry is experiencing rapid digital transformation due to a shift in consumer demands through e-commerce channels and a growth in the demand for value- added services. Several new companies such as Uber Freight, uShip, Convoy, Hwy Haul have sensed this opportunity to disrupt the industry and compete with the established players. The differentiating factor that provides them the competitive edge is the real-time information-based analytics, with maximum gains from end-to-end supply chain visibility.
These are some of the interesting ways in which data science is disrupting businesses in diverse domains. We are witnessing a huge transformation in how data is playing a role in decision making and building stronger businesses. The corresponding demand for competent data science is also growing rapidly. This is the foremost upskill area for IT professionals, and increasingly, for professionals in different fields such as Healthcare, R&D, Education, Cybersecurity, Retail etc. There is strong reason for aspiring to be the next Data Scientist, given the huge growth potential and an opportunity to deliver value for one’s business!
