Pandemic Rebound: Building Business Intelligence from Data Analytics

As businesses are assessing their long-term futures, data analytics play a significant role in decision-making. In this post we cover how data analytics uncovers insights that can help your business recover from this crisis.

Develop comparative data analysis

Business need to compare their organization's pre, during, and post the pandemic. Many organizations' current reporting structures compare month on month or quarter on quarter. However, this does not reveal the full story. While all countries have their own approach, the phases of the pandemic can be separated into broad buckets like infection, lockdown, social distancing, re-opening phases, and return to normal.

It is critical to review how your organization was impacted during the pandemic phases to gain insight into how to be better prepared for relapses, future strains, or other pandemics.

Analyze sales demand, order size, order frequency, spikes, logistics, cycle times, bottlenecks, key single points of failure, and other metrics for patterns that can be used to ensure you provide your customers with quality service during lockdowns and social distancing. Look across at how your competitors have fared, and benchmark your performance against them.

Use data analytics to understand scalability

Few businesses remained static during the pandemic. Either they scaled down, scaled up, cross-purposed, or drastically changed their ways of working – often a case of more than one.

The airline industry has significantly scaled down while online retailers are booming and scaling up. Examining your data to explore what areas of the business scaled up and what scaled down during COVID will be crucial for future risk mitigation. Document your findings and start making a plan in the event a future pandemic occurs. If you do not have data experts on staff, ProArch’s data analytics team can extract tangible business value from any data set.

Unify and visualize data

If the last few months has taught us anything it is that rapid access to quality data is crucial to business agility. 75% of business intelligence and data analytics professionals are working harder and longer hours now than before the pandemic, according to Forrester.

Healthcare, retail, and wireless carriers are just a few of the industries that were required to rapidly onboard new data and extract real-time insights from it. For example, without healthcare data from other countries' responses to the pandemic- forecasts for hospital beds, staff, and PPE would not have been possible.

Leveraging a data platform, like the Dataware data platform, that flexes from megabytes to petabytes of data as needed is key for centralizing your data to visualize the business opportunities for improvement.

Secure your data architecture

Working from home has now become the primary method of operation for many businesses. Tactical necessity has resulted in firewalls being opened, access rights being given, and new network infrastructure potentially connecting multiple classes and silos of data and offering it up to a wider audience.

Make sure you tighten your tactical configurations with a review of your organization’s data architecture. Ensure you are dealing appropriately with governance (e.g. Data Privacy).

From an infrastructure perspective, private network links, virtual network service endpoints, directory-based identities, multi-factor authentication, abnormal login detection and conditional access should all be configured with multiple layers between your organizations data and malicious entities. Equally as critical- if you did not have a pandemic in your risk plan before, you should do that now!

Now is the time to make data-driven business decisions to ensure your business emerges positively from the pandemic. If you already understand what your business needs to do in these unusual situations- you will be able to respond faster, be more prepared, and proactively manage future impact.