Why data science is crucial to your organization

Data science is a topic that is increasingly in focus among business leaders across industries. But why now, if its foundations were already laid more than 40 years ago?

Simply put, organizations are facing new challenges in managing their operations amid extreme market dynamics and a sharp rise in raw-material pricing caused by disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic, high inflation rates, the invasion of Ukraine and the shipping crisis.

In this context, many historical best practices have become irrelevant.

At NTT, when we support our clients in AI and data-science projects aimed at optimizing their business models or restructuring their operations, their primary driver is an increased perception of risk combined with diminishing trust in the data and tools they have used so far.

Without reliable, data-driven insights, it’s become somewhat of a guessing game to steer your organization in a new direction.

Automation is key to managing more data and a faster pace

The volume, complexity and velocity of data being collected are rising exponentially, making it impossible for the human mind to gather and analyze such data effectively and with sufficient depth in a short space of time. At best, one can hope to offer a snapshot after days or weeks of collating and analyzing data sets. Therefore, tools that dynamically model data have become indispensable – and this is where data science comes in.

Business latency – the time it takes to gather insights and act on them – now has to be measured in minutes or hours, yet many organizations face weeks or months of delays before they can act on insights gleaned from their data.

In our data-science engagements, we automate the aggregation of data and the generation of insights to generate actionable recommendations and risk-mitigation strategies that our clients can implement speedily.

AI-driven data analysis creates a neutral foundation for the discovery of data correlations that would be imperceptible in a manual analysis. Once the data has been sifted and presented in a way that highlights these correlations, business leaders and specialist teams can review it and offer their recommendations.

The value that people bring to this process is their industry-related expertise and their understanding of their markets, organizations, customers and supply chains, as well as their ability to make decisions based on a combination of the real-time data and their expertise.

Expertise and partnerships that drive decision-making

NTT’s data-science capabilities are based both on our internal teams and platforms (best showcased in our work with the Tour de France) and on the partnerships facilitated by NTT Innovation Lab Israel with other leading organizations in this field, such as SparkBeyond, to create a robust analytical foundation and drive intelligent decision-making in your organization.

And, because we are one of the world’s largest information technology integrators, we can host these systems on our highly secure Edge as a Service platform in your regional offices if you have concerns about the sensitive nature of your data.

“Today’s AI and computing foundations have reached a level of maturity that enables AI-assisted root-cause analysis, ideation and ongoing driver discovery for every business key performance indicator (KPI) represented in the data,” says Sagie Davidovich, CEO of SparkBeyond.

“Our mission at SparkBeyond is empowering businesses to make actionable discoveries that drive business impact across the entire range of KPIs. Our partnership with NTT brings SparkBeyond’s capabilities to the market, augmenting it with NTT’s rich and broad domain knowledge and a complete tech stack from the network to compute, AI and eventually business applications.”

Through our technical expertise, our insights into our clients’ industries and our best-in-class data-science capabilities, we offer you an effective solution to reduce risk, optimize your operations and reduce your business latency.

Want to learn more? Contact us now to set up an exploratory call.

Erik Heirman is Consulting Director at NTT