During my short stint in corporate America, I held several cross-functional roles that drew on my expertise in both business analytics and quality assurance. I usually worked alongside or in direct support of one or more project managers on various agile development projects. My primary responsibilities included acting as a liaison between senior leadership and the IT team to elicit, gather, define, document and test business and functional requirements. These experiences provided me with a firsthand account of how important utilizing big data can be to leadership career growth and development.

Big data is used to identify patterns and trends that can yield powerful insights into human interactions, especially consumer behavior. This data can include demographic, geographic and psychographic attributes collected from various sources throughout the consumer life cycle as well as from other areas of each individual’s life.

The idea of big data can seem scary. Data is being collected from everywhere all the time and leaders are expected to know how and when to use it. This newfound responsibility also means requirements to adapt to new technologies and ever-evolving policies and regulations around security and compliance issues.

Despite these concerns, the most successful leaders are learning to embrace big data as a catalyst to up-level their careers in three powerful ways.

1. Become a better decision maker.

Historically, intuition has been a highly favored attribute among leaders. Unfortunately, instinct can only take one so far. Access to big data analytics allows leaders to make fact-based decisions rather than those driven by emotion and belief. It is much better to know something to be true rather than to simply believe it to be true with no other basis for such belief than past experiences. Fact-based decisions have fewer risks, and leaders have an easier time isolating root causes of specific problems.

An executive coaching client, in the role of fund development manager for a local nonprofit organization, used big data analytics to identify trends in giving among high net worth donors. Armed with the compiled information, she was able to launch a new campaign that focused on the specific needs of this elite target market and increase their annual giving by 30%, (a well over seven-figure gain) in the following year. Imagine adding this impressive accomplishment to your curriculum vitae.

2. Stay agile.

Big data helps leaders be agile in their decision making and actions. Agility is a very important trait for leaders. Leaders who can look at the big picture strategy, easily break it down into smaller chunks, then quickly execute are simply more productive than those who don’t share this flexibility. Furthermore, by isolating and implementing smaller portions of the plan, one can easily determine where adjustments should be made to prevent resource drains and develop more efficient business systems.

Coming from a corporate background in IT, we used agile methodology to execute smaller portions of a larger software development plan quickly while quality testing and readjusting as needed along the way. Working in partnership with the project manager for an equipment financing company, we were tasked with developing an updated online sales process that required implementing new compliance rules.

Given the agile nature of the project, we actively tested as each new piece of the process was updated. An analysis of the big data collected identified a trend of customers abandoning a specific point in the updated sales process. A deeper drill-down into the data revealed that the page was considered too long and customers preferred less content on each page even though this would result in more pages. We were able to quickly adjust the process based on this revelation and roll out the new sales process, which resulted in an increase in successful online sales.

3. Positively impact the bottom line.

Employing big data saves companies time and money. Leaders who embrace big data make better decisions and have an easier time improving business operations, but there are many other ways this tool delivers value.

Big data can also result in both increased and new revenue streams. It drives product innovation. Leaders can more accurately tune into consumer behavior and capitalize on this knowledge by responding to market needs with new and improved products and services. Big data can also be organized and manipulated as a product in and of itself. Big data is most useful as compiled information. Leaders who can access, analyze and organize big data in new ways to solve problems may be sitting on their very own cash cow.

Take the case of Facebook and similar social media platforms. Startup companies have taken big data to new heights by turning these platforms into the largest consumer focus groups ever known. Utilizing big data in this way gives companies the ability to receive real-time feedback from customers and respond nearly just as fast. Big data has opened new doors for predictive analysis and for companies to market in ways never seen before.

While tackling big data may seem like a daunting task, it is a worthy cause for any leader desiring to advance his/her career. Not only does big data improve decision making, but navigating the world of analytics will increase your overall value, flexibility and marketability as a leader.

The post Three Powerful Ways Big Data Can Grow Your Leadership Career appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

There are many qualities that we search for in great leaders: wisdom; loyalty; constancy; courage; the ability to communicate persuasively, balanced with a willingness to hear uncomfortable truths and to change direction. But when it comes to a great data leader, a crucial role in an increasingly digitalised era, the defining characteristics vary slightly. Let’s explore what they are:

Ability to embrace change

To work in Information Technology in the early 21st century is to live in an era of unprecedented – and accelerating – change. New technologies are proliferating at such speed that even domain experts are struggling to keep up with new logos that appear in presentations summarising recent arrivals.

Furthermore, more data than ever before is available to support analysis, and in greater variety. Established methods for functions such as software development, information management and governance and the design and development of architecture and infrastructure are cracking under the twin pressures of the “new” and the requirement to do more, more quickly, with the same or fewer resources. It’s clear that these are challenging, but also exciting times for data leaders.

Little over two decades ago, the industry regarded business processes as ever-changing, but data structures as largely constant and stable. Businesses believed that if they modelled their data correctly and exhaustively, they would be largely insulated from changes in the world around them.

But in an era when the big web properties can make thousands of changes to their web-sites every month, the idea that we should map each-and-every new attribute to a well-defined and fixed domain in half-a-dozen downstream target systems now appear quaint and other-worldly.

“Big Data” is sometimes represented as a veritable Tsunami: the reality is that the challenge for today’s data leaders is not in dealing with a single, giant wave of data – but rather in working out how to manage and exploit scores of rivers of data, each of variable structure, quality, provenance, reliability and value.

Adaptability is key

In his seminal essay on software development, Fred Brooks observed many moons ago that it is the termites that technology managers and leaders should worry about, not the tornadoes.

For today’s data leader, the volume of data – the tornado – is far less of an issue than the variety, and the complexity that comes with managing that variety.

Without an adaptable leader at the helm, it’s impossible for organisations to succeed merely in managing that change, never mind exploiting it to drive business value. DevOps, Agile development methodologies, schema-less information management strategies, user-centred models of data governance, cloud and as-a-service deployment options, Deep Learning – all of these are merely tools that make more-or-less sense in different circumstances and for different use-cases.

Recognising and celebrating the plethora of new technologies, tools and frameworks now available to us – and adapting to circumstance by making appropriate choices in different scenarios – is the hallmark of success for today’s data leaders.

Einstein might have been thinking of the 21st century data-driven business when he observed that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

Today’s adaptable data leader can make smart choices about when and where to avoid over-simplification to avoid leaving business value on the table – and where to enforce simplification, to avoid the unnecessary complexity that slows business to a crawl. Because to adapt is first to make intelligent choices about what is merely important – and what is vital.

The post The importance of adaptability: defining a data leader appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.