Trusting a computer with business decisions may seem like a scary thought. However, business is already moving in that direction with analytics software helping us to calculate risk in a way that was previously impossible.
An example many of us may be familiar with is digital security software. Many firewalls can now tell us when to not open an email and when to not click on a website that may pose a danger of a virus or a hack. This software itself relies on data analysis to make these recommendation and now other software is starting to rely on similar techniques. Such software is able to process huge amounts of data once incalculable, and turn it into useful business advice.
Financial analytics software is an example of one area where this has come in use. Such software can interpret your costs and expenses and work out better ways of distributing your finances. For companies where you may have different departments such as a marketing department and a HR department, such software can analyse your costs over each department and help you better organise your budgeting.
This isn’t the only area where such analytics have a use. If you need an infrastructure management solution, there are now analytics tools that can monitor progress and advise you on how to speed up and improve processes. Such programmes can notify you of alerts and help record the productivity of your business. A sales company might use it to find out the best time for sales, who is performing and how long they’re spending on the phone. A manufacturing company might use such software to identify the weekly output and find out when faults are most likely to occur.
Another place in which analytics has found a use is in marketing. Software and plug-ins can now be used to record how many people are looking at a website or clicking on an ad, when the best times are for hits, who this audience are and where they’re arriving on the web from. This can allow a company to better focus its marketing campaign and get the best leads as a result. If the average age is between twenty and thirty and they’re most commonly visiting your site or ad during work hours, computer-based businesses that largely employ young people can be targeted.
Analytics is constantly finding new places where it can be implemented. That said, hard data cannot predict everything. One factor that is important to human evolution is creativity and whilst computers can help with new ways of doing things, these approaches will always be built on previous data. Being creative and pioneering involves going against the grain in many instances – effectively going against the risk assessment that analytics may provide. Businesses should use analytics as a guideline, but not make hard data the basis of every decision. Common sense and gut instinct can still play a large factor in successful business.
