In project or business planning, most complex decisions require that you accept having less of one thing in order to get more of another in what is called a tradeoff. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
Many entrepreneurs and executives at small or medium-sized businesses regularly rely on gut to make critical business decisions.
No business is short of competitors seeking to win over their customers. But every executive or business owner must continually adapt to remain relevant and profitable.
Margins are the lifeblood and must be grown or at the very least buffered against any environmental conditions that may eat into them. This calls for the use of business intelligence tools.
Larger organisations often times have a turnkey business intelligence benefit drawn from the premium licences that they pay for their enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.
SMB’s however must be smarter about how they analyse the market data available to them layered on in-house information to derive actionable insights.
A daily dance for business is to deliver a consistent product or service at a minimally fluctuating price point. This normally involves multiple factors in the delivery pipeline that must be proactively managed.
Relying on gut, group think or a simple excel sheet with a decision matrix may not suffice due to subjective evaluation or inputs, formula errors as well as the size and variety of data in play.
Since the creation of Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing platform, IBM researchers have been in a constant quest to extend its service offering.
Trade off analytics is one of the many services that became available earlier this year that can be spun off in their BlueMix cloud service platform to power “optimal alternatives across multiple criteria” on demand.
Many businesses already use cloud based platforms such as Lipisha, PesaPal, KopoKopo, Uhasibu, WezaTele among others to manage sales, collections and inventory. Therefore, getting smarter about optimising their businesses is a data ingest away.
Applicable to all service sectors and made accessible via the cloud at decent price points, having Watson crunch the data and present all possible analysed options visually, brings to life the idiom, seeing is believing.
The beauty is that the value can be realised by both the in-house publics to fine-tune business processes and by customers to the business where they are provided with tools such as wizards or recommendation engines that help trigger a purchase decision.
Interesting use cases for the business of government can be imagined, but that perhaps is for another day as the takers are few in that segment.
Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic | www.mbuguanjihia.com | @mbuguanjihia
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