The most influential leaders are said to share an important ability – they are exceptional decision makers, and a corollary that follows is that most good decision makers logically have the potential to be good business leaders. Whichever side of the theory you support, the imperative of good decision skills is evident to those who have faced a crisis. Fluid situations, extraordinary circumstances, and miniscule response times can complicate the decision process manifold. From day-to-day small decisions that determine the basic hygiene of organizations to big decisions that affect the entire company, all of these can impact an organization quite deeply.

Any knowledge into a similar previous situation or insight into the possible behavioral outcomes gives greater predictability and therefore lesser damage if something untoward occur. There is noisy information available in this newly connected digital world, and often too much of it comes our way. But insights are the opposite – few data inputs to make the most accurate decision possible, like the final clear distillate that condenses from a muddy mix of information.

After all of the data-led outcomes are considered, two possible outcomes must be always considered separately which go beyond insights and fall in the realm of experience – False Positive and False Negative. The False Positive, the one that is easier to detect, is the information that wrongly indicates that a particular business condition is present, when it is actually not. The False Negative, the more slippery of the two, is best explained by the axiom, an absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

It must be remembered that just having access to a great amount of information doesn’t mean that we’re always looking at the right information. If the information gathered is not useful to create something insightful, the data accumulated is redundant.

A few years ago, companies would mine information, run analytics, and save it for future decisions. Today, Big Data is a common enough term that refers to the concurrent processing of data to have every action decided by data in real time. This not only helps improve the chances of accomplishing significant valued results in the shortest possible time, but also is an aid in improving efficiencies. The ability to take quick actions, stay efficient, utilize relevant data, and analyze and create actionable insights gives organizations a competitive edge they did not have earlier. Applying insights at the right time, there fore, becomes the most important factor.

The ability to take quick actions, stay efficient, utilize relevant data, and analyze & create actionable insights gives organizations a competitive edge over others

While data generation and analytics have improved the science of marketing analytics, business judgement is needed to challenge and validate approaches. Creativity also comes into the picture when you have to develop innovative ways to use data and identify new opportunities. Data insights can be seen as a new perspective and therefore it is imperative that organizations and brands use new methods of under standing their brands so that new insights emerge. Else, it is possible that with the same methods being used, paradigm blindness sets in, making the use of insights a detriment rather than a benefit.

Users across a large area of insights are brand communications stakeholders. Corporates depend more and more on insights before embarking on communication programs and find new ways to extract competitive intelligence. Corporates, Advertising Agencies, and others are increasingly relying on data insights to improve their communication performance and build reputation. As companies become more information-centric, they recognize the value of data and analytics as strategic to the business. The analysis has not only changed the way decision makers handle different situations, but it has neutrally altered individuals and organizations as well. They are exposed to a renewed system of functioning that may sometimes be different from their traditional school of thought. However, this will aid in effectively conveying the company’s ambition and provide them with time to explore more important issues and opportunities.

Data insights increase efficiency, reduce costs, and increase the chances of success, especially when new or large actions are being embarked upon. There are a growing number of companies through out myriad industries (including Finance, Healthcare, Energy, Education, and more) that simply wouldn’t exist without the data science that is available today. Information is consumed for the simplest of ideas to the more complicated ones such as delivering entirely new products and services to build businesses that are more innovative from the ground up. Just having a great idea and not knowing how to further expand it to the market is useless. The data needs to yield insights that can feed into the decisions that companies can actually make, when they need to make them.