Indian companies need healthy data ecosystem for analytics

At a time when analytics is gaining traction among organisations, an Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) working paper states that organisations need to work towards building healthy ecosystem of information through data processing tools. The paper lays emphasis on use of data processing tools so that information strategists are able to visualize data and process them together to extract the right information for key decisions.

Titled 'Data Science for Decision Making in Developing Economies: A Travesty of Business Investments?', the paper has been authored by Arindam Banerjee.

Based on a recent survey of Analytics Adoption in Indian business organization, the author makes a claim that for most organisations grappling with the problem of incomplete and unorganized data, the tools of data science are mostly unhelpful in providing impactful information for decision making.

Rather, what is required for most organizations embarking upon the Analytics journey is a strategic information plan which assesses requirement, availability and enhancement of information to support key decisions of the organization.

This requires the generic skills of problem structuring and information resource identification and mapping them to business decision making. Knowledge of processing tools is important to the extent that information strategists are able to visualize what data and how to process them together to extract the right information.

"Therefore the top most priority in organizations in nascent environments is to work towards building a necessary healthy ecosystem of information which in the future will facilitate more analytics driven decision making," the paper states.

The paper is of the view that while the implementation of data science in a direct sense is easier, provided the data are available in a form that readily lends themselves to processing and insight generation, for most organizations in developing economies, there is much work to be done in data management preceding such direct and impactful use of data tools.

"Barring some domains such as digital commerce (which are about 5 per cent of the total transaction in India), most business organizations do not have the luxury to an organized access to information," the paper said. Hence, Analytics processes in countries like India require a different focus compared to what is seen in the developed world," the paper, on the basis of interviews with 25 executives associated with analytics across industries in India, states.