Episode 5: Data is the Difference for Retail

The competitive dynamic in the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries has reached a fever pitch. And those firms that can better collect, understand and leverage their data assets will be the winners. Data is not only the key ingredient for improving customer experience, but it is also essential for the “back-office” functions that improve efficiency. The key aim for retailers and CPG firms is to build an effective corporate data platform that can support both needs.

There is no shortage of pundits and experts proclaiming the value of corporate data. Many note that it will be the new “currency” of business, or the “oil” that powers business. This is accurate, but when a CIO or CEO looks at making data their corporate currency, they find that there is a long way to go. Currency can be defined as “a standardization of money (or data) in any form and is in use or circulation as a medium of exchange”. Currency is consistent, known, and universal. Unfortunately, in most organizations, data is not. The question is how to get from the current state where data, unlike money, is distributed, siloed, and inconsistently defined, to a future state where it is indeed used and managed much like money is today.

The move to digital business has wrought profound changes in certain industries, and financial services is one of them. Not only are traditional financial services companies using data and technology to change the game, a plethora of “FinTech” startups are using digital products to dislodge traditional players. This podcast episode features Peter Ku. Vice President, Chief Industry Strategist for financial services for Informatica. He shares his insight, expertise, and experiences in helping financial services firm become data-driven.

Technology is changing how healthcare and life sciences organizations operate. With more information and analytics to find the “meaning” from the data resource, these organizations are making breakthroughs in therapies, discoveries, and patient outcomes. This blog details the key points from a recent podcast with Richard Kramer, Chief Strategist Healthcare and Life Sciences at Informatica. The podcast detailed best practices and strategies for building a data layer in these vertical industries. First and foremost, organizations are making substantial investments in managing data as an asset. Executives are focused on ensuring that the business has trustworthy fit-for-purpose data, and employees can make it useful. In addition, master data management and governance are necessary to reduce data friction. The idea of master data governance is all about getting accurate and useful data in place so that it can be used across the enterprise. Some examples provide excellent illustrations of these goals. Anthem is investing in an enterprise data catalog. They understand it is very difficult to manage data as an asset if they don't know where it is, where it's going, or what happens in between. Transparency and trust are mandatory.  Eli Lilly is investing in a data marketplace, a central place for data assets to be discoverable and consumable across a large, complex enterprise. The benefits of these initiatives are substantial. The goal is to use data to break down silos. Data becomes the common “language” in a global company, and it has tremendous value by providing consistency and coordination across the business. Data is also essential to smoothing the processes between different entities, like providers and insurance carriers. With trustworthy, fit-for-purpose data, federated business processes work more effectively. The data platform is an essential resource for every healthcare and life sciences organization. It will provide the foundation for modern operations that run on facts, not guesswork.

The successful, modern business is data driven. Information is the “platform” for operations, decision making, and strategic insight. Organizations that are more skilled at using and understanding data will develop competitive advantages that will be hard to overcome. This podcast, featuring Jitesh Ghai, Chief Product Officer at Informatica, focuses on how any organization can better leverage and utilize their unique information asset. The starting point is to view data not as discrete data sets or data bases, but as a holistic platform that can be utilized across many diverse use cases that enable innovation and more effective operations. This requires that IT teams remove complexity and barriers to using data. Further, the data management platform of the future has data intelligence and insight to increase its use by more individuals or teams. Moving forward, while there are many different apps or systems that contain data, there should only be one data management platform. This approach limits fragmentation, improves usability, and perhaps most importantly, it improves the validity and completeness of the data being used to ensure analyses provide the right answers. A good example of the value a data management comes from Unilever. Using a modern data platform that reduced supplier on-boarding times from months to days, they were able to better manage their supply chain during the pandemic to reduce disruptions and ensure more of their items were continuously available. A modern data platform, such as Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, is the foundation for moving forward. The ability to better utilize the corporate data asset improves speed, efficiency, and operational processes more effectively, all of which lead to better financial results.