To edge out rivals, act fast on insights from your business

Markets call for products and services which meet a need or add value to an already existing solution. Entrepreneurs are constantly searching for product-market fit, with markets in constant flux, influenced by various things that affect demand and supply.

I argue that there is not much we can label as new; almost everything is a mash-up of what already exists with very few moonshot ideas that in themselves have high barriers to entry at the capital and talent level. The majority are left to grapple with increasingly commoditised marketplaces and thin margins.

Couple this with the fact that we are now in the information age. The information asymmetry gap is rapidly closing as silos open up and new infrastructure is set up across industries, freeing troves of data that have in the past been offline and processed manually.

Information in itself can be useless, a burden on the bottom-line that drives up operating costs on acquisition and storage, and a waste of time where valuable man-hours are spent looking at it without the ability to spot critical signals. The latter happens when talent lacks the right tools or technical debt exists.

Served with this predicament, the only solution to not only survive but also thrive for any business remains its ability to move quickly based on high-quality data. Your data pipeline should be capable of ingesting from various sources conscious of the different formats and structures at the source.

It needs to sanitise and normalise the acquired information, presenting a view that other internal tools apply business logic on. Application of business logic now turns this into information and is analysed further into insights. Step one, in this overly simplified flow, is done.

Garnering insight without action is a pointless pursuit. Insight should lend itself towards aggressive or defensive movement by your business. To avoid waxing philosophical, insight could also have you do nothing as it may confirm that the desired market position is currently in place.

The speed at which your business works could be the difference between keeping on a growth trajectory or slowing losing out to more agile and adaptive peers where the ‘war’ is won on volume and margin and where it is possible to execute interventions programmatically.

This cuts across all internal publics and its effects reflect on the bottom line. Use data and speed to bake-in business resilience.

Njihia is the head of business and partnerships at Sure Corporation | www.mbuguanjihia.com | @mbuguanjihia