Actionable Analysis: What It Is & Why Your Business Needs It
Businesses across industries now understand the value of collecting and using data to achieve various goals. While most companies use data for purely informational purposes, it has more valuable use cases than just informing certain decisions.
Instead, you can use data to do actionable analysis. Imagine being able to know the possible outcomes of certain developments in the market and the most probable outcome before it happens. That’s exactly what actionable analysis can offer you. Let’s see what it is and why your business needs it.
What is an actionable analysis?
The term “actionable analysis” is rooted in the word peruse, which means to examine in detail and with attention. The goal is to use the data to inform action. In other words, it refers to getting insights from data.
The actionable analysis encompasses all other types of analysis, including descriptive, diagnostics, predictive, and prescriptive analysis. Going through all these steps of analysis can help you find out what happened, determine why something happened, discover what can happen, and how to make something happen in the future.
Actionable analysis is made possible thanks to actionable insights, which is just another term used for processed data sets. These data sets enable businesses to base meaningful actions on the analysis of previously unprocessed, raw data.
Now that you understand what actionable analysis is, let’s see how you can benefit from it.
Facilitate informed decision making
The outcomes of decision-making processes are critical for the success of any organization despite its size and industry. Businesses often have entire teams working together to make the best possible decision regarding future strategies, business optimization, and others.
In the past, the factors such as previous experience and a hunch played a vital role in this process. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with informed decision-making. To make it “informed”, organizations need to use data and actionable analysis.
Instead of past experience, you can leverage data to drive actions. You will avoid making biased decisions and be able to drive positive business impact. As a result, you will facilitate business growth and be ready to make even the most challenging decisions you might face in the future.
Improve your organization’s response times
The global markets are considerably more competitive than they were just a couple of years ago. What’s even more troubling for business owners is that the competition is becoming increasingly harsh. To cushion this threat, companies deploy various strategies. They launch wide and aggressive marketing campaigns, adjust prices regularly, and frequently run discounts and sales.
However, the success of all these strategies when it comes to getting an edge over the competition depends on how fast you can implement them. The best way to improve your response times is to monitor the relevant data and get actionable insights.
With the correct data, you won’t have to wait and see what your competition is doing. Instead, you will be able to respond to shifts in the market and choose an appropriate course of action.
Identify where to invest next
Investment decisions are among the toughest decisions to make when there is a surplus in the company’s budget. There are hundreds of startups and small companies being launched every week. How do you know which one is worth investing in? Tracking everything that’s going on in markets and across industries is borderline impossible.
That’s where actionable analysis can be of enormous help. With access to relevant, actionable insights, you can discover all investment opportunities. You can cross-reference them against your company’s investment portfolio and choose the most promising ones.
Achieve operational excellence
Operational excellence is a common objective for most successful companies out there. However, optimizing processes with efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction in mind is not an easy task. You need to identify what needs to be improved while ensuring it won’t negatively impact your staff’s job satisfaction rates.
Monitoring your process and collecting relevant data is a good start. With access to this data, you can do actionable analysis and keep close tabs on all your business processes. You can identify bottlenecks, dependencies, and potential holdbacks.
All these insights can help you choose the best optimization strategies while bringing your teams on board to ensure everyone is satisfied with the customizations and fine tunes.
What do you need to do?
There are only two things you need to have to do actionable analysis. One is the relevant data, and the other is data analytics tools. Access to tools is easy today, and there are a couple of free ones online. However, tracking, collecting, and storing the relevant data is quite challenging here, especially when it comes to tapping into external sources.
That’s why many organizations work with professional data providers. Data providers are companies that collect, update, and transform data so their clients can use it out of the box.
Conclusion
The actionable analysis is quite powerful, and it has transformative capabilities. It can enable you to make informed business decisions, make your organization more agile, help you identify valuable investment opportunities, and achieve operational excellence.