Data is the new oil has been quite the clichéd phrase, yet it’s never been truer. Organizations across sectors are looking at harnessing the power of data to drive growth or to just even survive.
As the pandemic has shifted businesses in the digital transformation journey, the aviation industry witnessed a shift in customer behaviors from offline to online or touchless services. Vinod Bhat, Chief Information Officer, Vistara, believes the data information is helping them to look at multiple channels and understand customers better in terms of behaviors and requirements.
“We are keeping a T shape,” Bhat said. “The T top horizontal is the data information and, wherever we need to dissect; we go inside those other data drone distance, while we keep the big picture in mind but, as many spikes as we can drill down a specific area.”
Adding on this, Brandon Rowberry, Chief Executive Officer – Digital Health, Aster DM Healthcare stated, the vast majority of healthcare organizations have a primary data-informed strategy. Digging on the reasons, he says, “The crux of healthcare has been around doctors and nurses ever since it started. In healthcare primarily, it is data-informed, as it leads to a person with specialized expertise to help us get to wherever we want to go. In healthcare, the data does become a potentially life or death situation. Just like now, we are living through the pandemic.”
Suggesting a bifurcated approach of both, Hitesh T.K, Chief Information Officer, Vodafone Idea Limited, says, “I think today we go with both efforts and follow a bifurcated approach. It is a question of which of both apply to you. For example, in terms of data-driven, it might be applicable for whether you want to give a business KPI to set up business users or to the customer as an offer. We run it and call it customer value management (CVM) as now customers are digital-driven. Considering data-informed, when it comes to IoT or an M2M, we want to return with a new product in the market again, data-inform plays a role. So, we separately run separate rules machines.”
Data in Customer Personalization
Over the past years, multiple digital age companies have been on the rise in the data-energized world. Such as in fantasy gaming, it might be easier to get customer data but, it is equally difficult to retain a customer.
Speaking on this, Abhishek Ravi, Chief Information Officer, Dream11, said, “We have customers at the center of the universe. We employ both of the methodologies as it has got so many dimensions. From a person comes and registers to the onboarding. We are having more than hundreds of experiments going on the part of the customer journey and, we are constantly evaluating. We are cognizant of the fact that data can take us to a particular place and, after that you, need to become data-informed wherein you analyze that data to have a complete picture.”
With the central focus being on customer satisfaction for all sectors, the personalization experience for the customers plays a vital role in data utility. Citing a point of view regarding the same from a food industry vertical, Goda Doreswamy, AVP – Data Science, Swiggy said being data-driven or data-informed is a point in the journey question.
“Food especially is a unique area,” Doreswamy said. “The same item in every restaurant is different, local variations portion, size variation, etc. So, food intelligence is one area where I have seen a beautiful marriage of human and artificial intelligence. Like, you have a set of people in building the taxonomy, machine learning models are learning, on top of that, a sample is getting validated in a human in the loop system for us to constantly understand the full abstract of food, which is understood and personalized.”
Changing Landscape of Data security
Data sharing and retrieving have come with the cost of security, due to which the middle east market has started regulating with new regulations. With India coming up with a personal data protection bill, the organization’s leaders give their standpoints.
Considered as one of the crucial sectors for the data regulations in the global aspects, in healthcare, the predictions for the upcoming rules perform a significant role in keeping track of coming up policies.
“Most foreign or sovereign nations have compliance regulations where their data cannot leave their shores, that is one, believe in it. However, there are cases where if we could aggregate more of that data across beyond shores, we could probably provide even better services to two nations, particularly developing nations. Our strategy and that we have to get ahead and work with great vendors and partners based on presupposing”, said Brandon Rowberry, Chief Executive Officer – Digital Health, Aster DM Healthcare.
Along with regulating data security policies, Vinod Bhat, Chief Information Officer, Vistara, pointed to data flow tracking as one of the significant aspects of data protection.
He says, “Airlines are a very regulated industry. We are dealing with customer data in a heterogeneous environment. During the pandemic, the perimeter of the enterprise has changed. So, now you got a lot more open-end slots more endpoints, where you need to make sure that they have been covered with a holistic strategy. Not only the customer part but also how the data flows from end to end, where it is unsafe, where it is encrypted and, who are the people using it. You need to know complete privileged access management (PAM). It is not done suddenly once, in a month or, once in two months, we do it is on daily repeats.”
The Dos and Don’ts
The panel also put out the advice for the enterprises to kick off with their data journey. Summarizing the insights, Vimal Venkatram, Country Manager, India, Snowflake averred, “What matters is the intent to change the organization, from a CEO to every employee. The second is how do you measure success and, the third thing is that I might not be in business five years from now because of the traditional way. Once you realize, then it gets into breaking down siloed data, choosing a technology platform that can effectively move data into a single source of truth, outcomes, turning quick wins into force multiplier internally, etc.”
