This blog is written by Christian Redgewell.
This is the most common question I have received in my career and one that is always a difficult answer to tackle. I then have questions flying around such as:
- Who is asking?
- What is their level of IT understanding?
- Do they really want to know or are they being polite?
- How can I succinctly explain the work I perform?
- What is my elevator pitch?
- How can I make this interesting to someone who isn’t in IT?
I usually flounder and make something up that doesn’t really encapsulate what I do at all. I then kick myself for not selling to a captured audience and so here we are. My wife recently asked me a question.
“So, this Data Cubed thing…. what are you going to do? I see lots of people each day and they ask how you are and what you are doing, how do I sell this new project to them?”
Now I would suggest that one of the things I pride myself on is being able, to simplify a technical problem for anyone and break it down into layman’s terms. The challenge is to do this for myself and enable our business to benefit our future clients.
We, at Data Cubed, know why we do what we do. We have all worked across multiple industries and seen the problems organisations have with data. We have lived through the different buzz words, from “Business Data Warehouse and “Big Data” to “Data Lakes”. I have seen these described as “nebulous technical jargon” recently which I just loved as it is so apt. Data buzzwords are great if you are a Data Analyst or a Business Intelligence specialist and get what they mean. It does not explain to your C-level or Board why these new buzz words are important to their business and profit margin. Why would they want to spend money on this? If we are true to ourselves, how many of us have worked on data warehouse strategies and implementations that took too long to implement and therefore provided no benefit?
What is it we know at Data Cubed? We know that, most importantly, we can fix this pain. We also know that we can find your sources of data, sometimes duplicated data, and make it work for you. Why would you want to do this? Because then you can start making decisions around your business based on facts rather than a gut feel. Now there is nothing wrong with a gut feel but wouldn’t it be easier to write that business case based on live data, not a monthly or annual report that is already out of date? How many businesses went under during Covid because they didn’t know their own business well enough to make anything beyond educated guesses?
We want to fix that; we want to make your business hum. Because if your business succeeds so does ours. If our business succeeds, then so does the coffee shop I keep running with my caffeine addiction. It means I can take my kids to the pub so we can get a refreshing lemonade on a sweltering day.
NZ is a small player on the world stage but with huge aspirations. Let’s start making smarter calls on how we focus ourselves and our business, work smarter not harder.
So, we get back to the question of what do I do? As everyone usually says a picture speaks a thousand words, so I will start with a picture and then hopefully I can develop my elevator pitch to you the reader.
- We find your data.
- We plan your migration to a tool that helps you visualise your data in one place.
- We help you choose where your data works best for you.
- We enable you to benefit from the latest tools to enrich and enhance your understanding of your data.
We can break these steps down to explore what those steps really entail.
- Find – We talk to your business, the people who work and deliver day in and day out. We find out when you have three CRM systems. We highlight when you have 3 records of the same client in 3 different systems.
- Plan – We plan with you how to present these multiple streams of data into a platform that allows you to see this data and how it affects your business. A spreadsheet each month in a report doesn’t always cut it. A live graph showing you how many new customers you are gaining but also how many you lose through not retaining them is providing real value. We all know you spend more to get a new customer then you do to retain one. So why don’t we try to retain them?
- Choose – We help you design, implement, and operate this platform based on our experience of how to keep the ROI low. We deliver something iterative that delivers value fast and allows you to build on it.
- Benefit – We let you benefit from this improvement in your data insights. Finding your key metrics to better understand how you can deliver value.
- Find
- Plan
- Choose
- Benefit
Our four steps to supercharge your data and enhance your business.