By Amit Suxena For a business’ bottom line, its operations and the experiences of day-to-day interactions with different stakeholders, data, and the stories they tell play a vital role. Between the success of a company and a comprehensive data strategy, there is a direct link, research shows. Compared to organisations that have witnessed a decline in terms of significant revenue growth over the last three years, organisations with a growth of more than 20% are more likely to have initiatives for data protection, connected systems, and intelligent automation. Today, organisations are ravenous for data and insights. Although they are facing the growing challenges of data security, data management, and data processing, they demand information at their fingertips. Here is where most companies find their dreams for agility come to a halt. Cracking the code towards a successful, comprehensive data strategy Business and IT leaders can together untangle this challenging situation by finding the answer to the fundamental question: How can my company best harness the power of data in a way that easily delivers real-time, streamlined insights without compromising security? It all starts with having the right foundation in place – a solid, modern cloud infrastructure designed specifically for the enterprises of today. The opportunities that cloud creates are real and present today, providing the building blocks for companies to pioneer groundbreaking innovations and disrupt entire industries. Today, we are already seeing organisations across various industries use AI for automatic forecasting or autonomous services which eliminates the need for human intervention. In Thailand, for example, PTG Energy Public Company Ltd., leading full-service provider, tapped into the strength of the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) to see a much shorter provisioning time – from days to minutes, which meant quicker business reporting. They were also able to optimise business investment by gathering real-time and accurate data of customer behaviour, tailoring better customer loyalty programmes. Second generation clouds enable highly complex workloads and mission-critical systems. They deliver better guarantees for security, continuity, control, and price performance. Besides, this provides access to innovations spanning autonomous databases, AI, machine learning (ML), blockchain, IoT, and human interfaces. Ultimately, IT organisations will have the confidence and new capabilities to completely rely on the cloud for their mission-critical operations. Empowering business users from the front office to the back office Today’s modern business is connected, intelligence-driven, and pulls the future forward by harnessing emerging technologies such as cloud, analytics, and AI to not only address current market demands, but also to revolutionise for tomorrow. A great example of this in practice in the information technology service industry is Millennium Information Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd. (MillenniumIT ESP), one of Sri Lanka’s leading information systems solutions providers. To keep up with the world of digitalisation by investing in innovations, MillenniumIT ESP collaborated with Oracle to adopt Oracle ERP Cloud to help simplify its business processes and increase visibility into its financial operations. This effort of MIT helps create agility and reduce IT complexity resulting in better business performance and improved decision making. The benefits of a unified ERP and HCM Cloud have never been clearer. With connected and scalable Modern Best Practice processes that leverage next-generation technologies and that are built into Oracle’s ERP Cloud and HCM Cloud, organisations can quickly become the transformative and collaborative business of today and the agile and innovative business of the future. Making sense of the data: Discovering insights with analytics Data is flooding in from various sources – mobile, computers, servers, wearables, and IoT devices – leading to a rise in unstructured data. Add to that the changing regulations and most businesses are unable to process and analyse all the information available to them. As a result, they often make critical decisions relying only on subsets of data and miss out on potential growth opportunities. This is where prebuilt analytics applications come in – the next big wave of innovation for analytics and business intelligence. These are role-based applications that deliver insights in the context of a businessperson’s role and they include both in-the-moment metrics as well as forward-looking KPIs. The future of analytics is self-service access to intelligent insights. By leveraging embedded machine learning and integrating analytics, intelligent insights present the right information to the right people at the right time, using a device of choice. Unlocking endless possibilities and driving innovation For companies that are geared to grow their business while excelling in today’s data-driven economy, a broad and connected strategy to leverage data is necessary. Organisations can unlock a myriad of possibilities that can positively impact their business, employees, and customer experience if they have a proper data strategy in place. Not only that, a comprehensive strategy will also enable organisations to positively influence the communities around them as well. (The writer is the Managing Director and Vice President of SAGE at Oracle Corporation. This article is published exclusively by The Sunday Morning Business in Sri Lanka)