The Impact of Data and Analytics On Business and Finance
The Impact of Data and Analytics On Business and Finance
Analytics on
Business and Finance
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Foreword
Thank you very much for your interest in our research: The Impact of Data and Analytics on
Business and Finance.
The world’s economy will dramatically transform in the coming years. According to International Data
Corporation (IDC), a premier global provider of market intelligence, 50% of the world’s GDP will be
based on data-related products, services, and experiences by 2025. This means organizations will be
leveraging digital technologies and data more than ever before and therefore companies need to be better
prepared for that future state.
Data Analytics is especially important to the Chief Financial Officer and their finance teams who have
been called on to deliver better decision-making techniques at their companies. Yet, there is evidence
that finance is behind in using advanced analytics to accomplish this.
Additionally, not many analytics projects are successful. Studies by Gartner, McKinsey, and many more
organizations have shown a dismal success rate of analytics projects. In this regard, we at DBP-Institute
and CFO University have carried out a research to understand the impact of Data and Analytics on
Business and Finance. We hope, you will find this report i.e., the DBP-CFO Insights report useful
to you and your organization. For any questions or clarifications, do not hesitate to contact us
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The Contributors
The DBP-CFO.University Insights report is researched, analyzed, and prepared by the following
members
Dr. Prashanth H Southekal, Ph.D., MBA, MS, is the Founder and
Managing Principal of DBP – a Data Analytics Consulting and
Education firm. He brings over 20 years of experience consulting for
over 75 companies such as SAP, Shell, Apple, P&G, and GE. Besides,
he has trained over 2500 professionals the world over in Analytics.
Dr. Southekal is the author of 2 books - Data for Business Performance
and Analytics Best Practices and is an adjunct faculty of Data
Analytics at the University of Calgary (Canada) and IE Business
School (Spain). Dr. Southekal holds a Ph.D. from ESC Lille (FR) and
an MBA from Kellogg School of Management (US).
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1. Introduction
Today, data is a key resource for improving business performance for enhanced insights, operations, and
compliance. It is not only the data-driven companies such as Facebook, Google, Uber, Netflix, and
Amazon, but also companies like Domino’s Pizza, Goodlife Fitness, Lego, John Deere, Novartis, and
many more that are leveraging data and technology for better business performance and results. A report
from MIT says, digitally mature firms are 26% more profitable than their peers [MIT, 2013]. McKinsey
Global Institute indicates that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers,
six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times more profitable [Bokman, 2014].
Before we go further, let’s see at what exactly Data Analytics is? Though there are many definitions of
data, fundamentally, analytics is using data for gaining insights by asking the right questions
[Southekal, 2020]. There are three main types of analytics that provide business insights as part of the
“Analytics Continuum”: Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Prescriptive Analytics.
Descriptive Analytics i.e., insights on historical performance, Predictive Analytics i.e., insights on what
will happen in the future, and Prescriptive Analytics i.e., throws light on the best course of action.
Given the potential of data for improved business performance and results, business enterprises today
from Retail to Financial services to Energy sectors across the globe are looking at ways to derive insights
from data analytics and make good business decisions. Global market intelligence firm International
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Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the spending on data and analytics to reach US$ 274.3 billion by 2022
[Haller and Satell, 2020]. However, not many organizations are successful in transforming their data into
insights. Andrew White of the research advisory firm Gartner reported that 80% of analytics insights did
not deliver business outcomes [White, 2019]. Mckinsey consulting says, fewer than 20% of the companies
have maximized the potential and achieved analytics at scale [Miranda, 2018].
However, every industry type is different and each has its own challenges in leveraging data and
analytics. To understand the current state of Data and Analytics, we ran a few surveys to understand the
impact of data and analytics on business and finance better. We at DBP and CFO.University started our
survey at the highest level – the business domain or function, and we found that the business domain
that has the highest impact on data and analytics is Sales and Marketing including Customer360.
Data and analytics in Sales and Marketing can help a business gather customer, product and channel
data in driving sales and marketing efforts so that the business can grow, protect its market share, and
expand into new geographies. Given that Marketing, SCM, and Finance are the most popular domains
for Data and Analytics, we went a step further to see which of the KPIs each of the top 3 business domains
i.e., Sales/Marketing, SCM, and Finance are important considering that KPIs link the business
performance to data and analytics
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The following visual shows the KPIs that are important in Sales and Marketing.
Leading data and analytics expert Gary Cokins made this observation recently, “regarding advance
analytics the CFO and accounting community are 5 to 10 years behind other functions such as marketing
and supply chain management.” This indictment of finance leaders is supported by recent polls. First,
80% of respondents indicated they have seen no tangible results from their finance transformation
projects and nearly 50% have only just begun.
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However, there is also recognition that data analytics will play a key role in the success of finance teams
with over half the finance leaders responding to our poll selecting data analytics as the transformative
initiative that will have the most impact on their business.
Furthermore, the chart below highlights the weighting of two sets of KPIs that are critical to the CFO
function. The common denominator in all these measures is the high dependence on data analytics to
effectively derive insight from these KPIs.
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The following visual shows the KPIs that are important in SCM.
The KPIs selected by various professionals across Finance, Supply Chain, and Sales and Marketing across
the globe reflect two common themes.
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The finance function may be lagging behind in adopting advanced analytics but given our poll and recent
experience in the demand from finance leaders on the topic, finance is positioning to lead their businesses
in the art and science of data analytics.
As data and analytics become a core part of digital business, employees must have at least a basic ability
to communicate and understand conversations about data. But what exactly is data literacy and how can
organizations achieve it? At a high level, data literacy is the ability to derive insights from data and
implement them. Gartner defines data literacy as the ability to read, write and communicate data in
context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques
applied — and the ability to describe the use case, application, and resulting value [].
Specifically, this means enabling the organization to have competencies in the following 12 domains of
the data lifecycle (DLC).
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1. Data Acquisition
This domain covers the knowledge and skills required to navigate internal and external
systems to locate, access, organize, protect and store data related to the organization's needs.
2. Metadata Management
The domain entails the correct usage and interpretation of the data as metadata holds the
underlying definitions and descriptions of data.
3. Master data Management (MDM)
MDM is knowledge and skills to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, consistency and
accountability of the key master data elements like customers, products, and vendors.
4. Data Cleaning and Engineering
The knowledge and skills to search, identify, locate, access, and format data from a range of
sources using various data integration techniques pertaining to data transfer (to the Data
warehouse), data transformation, and orchestration of data.
5. Statistical Analysis
The competencies required to formulate a range of questions using data including applying
statistical and ML techniques for deriving insights from data.
6. Data Presentation
The knowledge and skills required to create meaningful tables and charts to visually present
data.
7. Data Driven Decision-making
This competency includes thinking critically when working with data; formulating
appropriate business questions; identifying the right datasets; prioritizing insights garnered
from data; converting insights into actions; and weighing the merit and impact of possible
solutions and decisions.
8. Data Storytelling
The knowledge and skills required to describe the insights from data. This includes
identifying the audience's needs, establishing the business context, and selecting effective
visualizations to support the KPIs in the reports and dashboards.
9. Data Ethics
The knowledge that allows a person to use data in a legal, secure, and ethical manner in line
with the organizational policies, procedures, and standards.
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10. Data Stewardship
Data Stewardship is the knowledge and skills required to effectively lead and manage data
assets. This includes the oversight of data to ensure fitness for use, the accessibility of the data,
and compliance with policies, directives, and regulations.
11. Data Governance
Data governance is a set of principles and practices that ensure high quality through the
complete lifecycle of the data.
12. Data Architecture
Data Architecture is the practice of designing, building and optimizing data-driven systems
by incorporating the company’s vision, strategies, business rules, standards, and capabilities
to manage the data in its entire lifecycle.
The following image illustrates the 12 important data literacy competencies required in business
enterprises.
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3.2 Quality Data
Fundamentally, data analytics has the potential to improve the company’s revenue, reduce expenses,
and mitigate risk. While data can be a valuable business asset, we derive tangible business results from,
data also has serious limitations and can become a huge liability if not managed well. In addition, data
quality is a vast problem in most enterprises. A Harvard Business Review article reports just 3% of the
data in business enterprises meet data quality standards {Nagle, 2017]. So, what can organizations do to
have quality data for analytics, given that data quality is contextual? Below are three key recommended
strategies for productively using data for analytics.
But, why does data type matter in analytics? Data type is important as it holds the key in
facilitating the selection of the right statistical technique for insight derivation. Structuring
the data enhances the utility of data. For example, in predictive analytics, if the response data
type is numeric in nature, Linear Regression is the preferred technique. But if the response
data type is nominal or categorical in nature, the recommended predictive analytics technique
to be applied will be Logistics Regression.
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• Data should complement Intuition.
Businesses are constantly searching for resources that are cheaper to procure, faster to deploy,
and more reliable to consume. From the analytics or insights point of view, insights can be
derived from intuition or data. If the data and analytics literacy in the company is low,
intuition precedes data as the main option for deriving insights. While intuition per-se has
some advantages, what is needed in today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
and ambiguity) business environment is deriving insights holistically by combining both
intuition and data.
3.3 Adoption
Adoption of insights is the third important challenge in realizing the value from data and analytics.
According to IDC, one major reason data and analytics projects fail is the lack of stakeholder buy-in, in
other words, adoption [IDC, 2020]. Below are four key recommended strategies businesses can take to
increase the adoption of data and analytics.
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term and long-term goals with specific data and analytics solutions. The roadmap allows you to
think big, but act fast and deliver in small increments.
The image below is a framework for implementing and adopting data and analytics solutions.
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4. Top Opportunities for Data and Analytics in Business
In general, revenue generation functions such as Marketing in Retail, Production in Upstream Oil/Gas
offer great opportunities for Data and Analytics. However, there are specific scenarios where Data and
Analytics can play a significant role regardless of the industry type or function.
The future of data and analytics is going to be more on integrating Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics.
Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics are like the two wings of the bird – you have to optimize what you
predict given that there will be constraints on business resources and companies can optimize (maximize
and minimize) the limited resources they have at their disposal.
Prescriptive Analytics can complement Predictive Analytics in all functions in any industry. For example,
the Finance Manager in a Retail company might predict the SG&A (Selling, General and Administrative)
expenses for 2024 as $750 Million using Regression techniques. However, if the Finance Manager is
looking at factors that will help in minimizing or further optimizing the SG&A expenses, she/he can
complement Predictive Analytics with Prescriptive Analytics. Oil companies can also use prescriptive
analytics to identify factors affecting the price of crude oil to get the best terms and hedge risks.
Fundamentally, Prescriptive Analytics is evaluating existing business conditions and considering the
consequences of each decision to determine how the future would be impacted. Moreover, it can measure
the repercussions or pay-off of a decision based on different possible future scenarios. These decision
factors can be determined using Prescriptive Analytics techniques such as Optimization and Sensitivity
Analysis given than Prescriptive Analytics focuses on finding the best course of action in a given scenario.
According to Investopedia, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria are a set of standards
for a company’s operations [Chen, 2021]. The economic forecast over the next few years i.e. in the post
COVID-19 scenario is dependent on governments investing huge investment into infrastructure,
industries, education, healthcare, social welfare and more. This means more scrutiny of taxpayers’
money. In order to access these programs, companies need to make provable claims on ESG fronts.
Hence, there is an opportunity for business enterprises to build the EPM (Enterprise Performance
Management) dashboards and KPIs more centered on ESG.
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Opportunity 3: Analytics Talent will not be determined by Location.
Global consulting firm McKinsey says, there is a big shortage of data analytics professionals [Manyika,
2017]. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, many companies allowed employees to work
remotely. Gallup poll in mid-March of 2020 found that only 31% of U.S. workers had ever worked
remotely. But by the beginning of April 2020, the proportion of workers who worked from home had
risen to 62% [Brenan, 2020]. With improved internet connectivity and better features in unified
communication tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, today many jobs could be done from home
than before.
Generally, these days, knowledge workers and individual contributors can accomplish most tasks
remotely without a significant drop in productivity. Remote work popularly called work-from-home
(WFH) is likely to continue, at least for the foreseeable future. The employee could be working remotely
from his/her home – whether it is in Boston or Barcelona or Bangalore. In other words, hiring top
analytics talent will not be determined by location.
Today, data is inexorably linked to function, process, and idea. Hence, the best-of-breed OLTP solutions
are more preferred over monolithic ERP applications as organizations are favoring the agile type of best-
of-breed transactional applications. This means the enterprise can harness exceptionally good features
along with potentially reduced cost and saved time!
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Figure 9: Business Drivers for CDW
And when it comes to selecting the CDW, Snowflake is the most popular CDW.
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5. Conclusion
Fundamentally, the purpose of data and analytics is to offer insights to know or to act for the
organization. If the purpose of analytics is to just know, ask
But, if the purpose of insights is to act, use the insight from predictive analytics to answer these questions,
• What events are adversely affecting the organization’s ability to plan, respond, and control?
• Who will own or consume the derived insights?
• How can you realize the change?
CFOs and their finance departments are normally the best positioned teams to facilitate the move to data
driven decision making. Broad business exposure, ability to link corporate strategy to financial results,
comfort deriving insight from data and growing communication skills are qualities these teams can
leverage to transform their businesses through effective application of data analytics.
Finance leaders, consider applying the concepts in this paper to 3 key areas of your business. Doing so
will have a profound impact on business operations and financial performance:
We trust you have found our report, The Impact of Data and Analytics on Business and Finance
enlightening and helpful. Please reach out where we can help your grow your analytics and finance
disciplines.
Good luck creating a team that drives the use of data analytics and its benefits in your business.
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Appendix 1: References
• Bokman, Alec; Fiedler,Lars; Perrey,Jesko; Pickersgill, Andrew, "Five facts: How customer
analytics boosts corporate performance", https://mck.co/2Ju0xYo, Jul 2014.
• Brenan, Megan, "U.S. Workers Discovering Affinity for Remote Work",
https://news.gallup.com/poll/306695/workers-discovering-affinity-remote-work.aspx, 2020
• Chen, James, “Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Criteria”,
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-and-governance-esg-criteria.asp,
2020
• Davis, Dwight, "AI Unleashes the Power of Unstructured Data", https://bit.ly/3bD9QkC, Jul
2019.
• EAB, “The top 10 emerging skills for 2022”, https://eab.com/insights/daily-
briefing/workplace/the-top-10-emerging-skills-for-2022/, 2018
• Gartner Peer Insights, “What are Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) Platforms?”,
https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/data-science-machine-learning-platforms, 2021
• Gartner, “Data Literacy”, https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/data-
literacy#:~:text=Data%20literacy%20is%20the%20ability,resulting%20business%20value%20or%
20outcome., 2021
• Gartner Glossary, https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/dark-data,
2021
• Haller, Eric and Satell, Greg, "Data-Driven Decisions Start with These 4 Questions", Harvard
Business Review, Feb 2020.
• IDC, “DC Survey Finds Artificial Intelligence Adoption Being Driven by Improved Customer
Experience, Greater Employee Efficiency, and Accelerated Innovation”,
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200610005127/en/IDC-Survey-Finds-Artificial-
Intelligence-Adoption-Driven, Jun 2020
• Idoine, Carlie, “Citizen Data Scientists and Why They Matter”, https://blogs.gartner.com/carlie-
idoine/2018/05/13/citizen-data-scientists-and-why-they-matter/, 2018
• Manyika, James, “Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and
wages”, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-
what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages, 2017
• Miranda, Gloria Macías-Lizaso, “Building an effective analytics organization”,
https://mck.co/39AKCBY, October 2018.
• MIT, “Digitally Mature Firms are 26% More Profitable Than Their Peers”,
https://bit.ly/2xBTPNe, Aug 2013
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• Moore, S., “How to Prevent Big Data Analytics Failures”,
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/how-to-prevent-big-data-analytics-failures/, 2015
• Nagle, Tadhg; Redman, Thomas, and David Sammon, “Only 3% of Companies’ Data Meets
Basic Quality Standards”, https://bit.ly/2UxaHO4, Sep 2017.
• Southekal, Prashanth, "Analytics Best Practices", Technics Publications, 2020
• WEF, “How much data is generated each day?”,
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/how-much-data-is-generated-each-day-cf4bddf29f/,
2019
• White, Andrew, “Our Top Data and Analytics Predicts for 2019”, https://gtnr.it/2yipnrC,
January 2019.
• World Bank, “COVID-19 to Plunge Global Economy into Worst Recession since World War II”,
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/06/08/covid-19-to-plunge-global-
economy-into-worst-recession-since-world-war-ii,2020
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Appendix 2: Abbreviations
• AI - Artificial Intelligence
• CDO - Chief Data Officer
• CDW - Cloud Data Warehouses
• CFO – Chief Financial Officer
• COTS - Commercial-off-the-shelf
• DLC - Data Lifecycle.
• EPM – Enterprise Performance Management
• ESG - Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance
• IT - Information Technology
• IoT - Internet of Things
• KPI - Key Performance Indicator
• MDM - Master Data Management
• ML - Machine Learning
• OLAP – Online Analytical Processing
• OLTP – Online Transactional Processing
• ROI - Return on Investment
• SCM – Supply Chain Management
• SG&A - Selling, General and Administrative
• TCO - Total Cost of Ownership
• VUCA - Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous
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DBP INSTITUTE CFO.UNIVERSITY
PRASHANTH SOUTHEKAL STEVE ROSVOLD
https://www.dbp-institute.com https://cfo.university
[email protected] [email protected]