Analytics has taken a very important space in our daily life. Its aspects are so wide that we use it very frequently knowingly or unknowingly. It’s the same for companies and now there are large-scale transformations occurring to utilize this new domain for leveraging the best available opportunities. Covid has shown us a new dimension of making everything digital which was not planned or thought so well in cases where digitalization seems tough and impossible. Companies are now moving towards cloud-based operations and artificial intelligence services. Customers use cases, business value from digital activity has plunged and huge data is being generated. Cloud comes as a savior in these situations, and every company tries its best to acquire the latest technology quickly. Time has come that company or product managers should be able to answer the how and why about events rather than just the what.
For apps-based services, Software As A Service (SAAS) applications have evolved faster and with India being the house of 23 unicorn start-ups, where all 23 have a business based on digital services. Products need to be embedded with new technologies and more than that need to leverage all the available data. For product managers, in product or SAAS requires addressing a few important aspects for business growth, which are scalability, limitations of the use of analytics, customizations capability & affordability, infrastructure challenges, and overcoming cost out of it. If all of them are challenges in some way then the company is having Retro Analytics, which were certainly not planned from cloud or modern SAAS.
For product managers, it’s necessary to make their products stand out and book profits in the market. For digital apps, services being flexible, agile is a key element. Modern analytics plays a vital role in building a system that is 100% cloud-native, scalable & flexible, applicable to microservices, developer-friendly, affordable. One must understand that modern analytics embedment in the business brings out value, like increasing revenue, reducing churn, and making a larger count of happy customers while competition is apart. Modern analytics brings out the scope of predictive and prescriptive in real-time to improve situations, operations, and tackle upcoming issues smoothly. Customer sales are not the only aspect that can hamper the whole business but also its downtime. We have seen global outages of Facebook, Instagram, and their impact on lives. Even for small-scale businesses, this is crucial. Being more independent, secure, stronger in analytics and technology brings business on the safer side for such incidents.
Retro analytics key indicators are non-scalable options, hard to implement new technology, or new features in products. User behavior is changing frequently, products need to capture those valuable insights in real-time, and within the churn time of customers. Retro analytics is safe but slow, chances of error are also high with modern analytics, but outcomes are more fruitful, making for unexpected challenges. Retro is limited with dashboarding, reporting to limited questions, limited key metrics which we want to analyze, but modern analytics have the capability to do the same inefficiently, affordable, and quickly. Retro analytics can be called static due to its characteristics, and also modern due to its dynamic nature. One of the characteristics of retro is that we do it based on hypothesis but for modern, we derive everything from data.
As the popular saying goes, that data is the new oil, whoever uses it efficiently can make advanced progress in business and product managers can make products that will be not just better but future-ready. At IIM Kashipur, the MBA Business Analytics specialization serves as the bridge between Retro & Modern Analytics as subjects, teaching experts are teaching new skills, with the help of advanced infrastructure available at the campus. This makes students ready to take the opportunity to lead any team in both ways.
Authors: Ayushi Jha & Saurabh Sarkhel
IIM Kashipur
MBA 2021-23