Grab Your Cheese with Data Science!

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, shares amazing principles to live by and drive change in your businesses. The book published in Sept’1998 describes change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to those changes by two mice and two "Little people", during their hunt for cheese.

Well, the four characters symbolically teach us the 6 principles to deal with change and transformation.

The “new normal” post COVID19 and the other socio-economic changes happening around, has certainly led many companies to deal with lot of mess! It has become pretty much “new normal” news in media these days of enterprises shutting down, people losing jobs and SMEs grappling with ideas for the new business models. To sum it up, CHANGE HAPPENS, pretty much inevitably! 
That brings us to the Principle #1: They Keep Moving the Cheese. (Change happens)

With the sudden halt in regular and even visionary planned activities, industries were left with nothing less than chaotic and turbulent times of lack of resources to tap new customers, envision future growth and even mobilize their own employees. Tough times don’t last, but tough businesses do! The companies who saw the evolving trends in direction of digital transformation, still saw a breather. However, the laggards in initiating digital transformation faced the brunt of the being in “Hem & Haw” mind-set. In the dynamic world we live in, the second principle is food for thought for leaders driving businesses in any industry at any scale. Principle #2: Get Ready for the Cheese to Move. (Anticipate change).

Digital Transformation is a journey to become excellent in what you deliver to consumers, at the minimal costs. The transformative process includes change management and thought leadership to define the boundaries and metrics of the process. These can only be defined by taking a top-down approach on exactly what value you want to deliver. It, hence, becomes phenomenally essential to know where you stand and where you want to reach. Companies starting anew with their digital transformation strategies, need a support arm to pivot their commandments to maximize their efforts for key offerings.

Principle #3: Smell the Cheese Often so You Know When It’s Getting Old. (Monitor Change). The support arm required to aid the leadership is deep dive look in data and make data-driven decisions with help of Data Science. Data Science provides the patronage to take calculated risks and informed decisions. Being a subset of bigger picture of digital strategies deployed by the businesses, data science improvises the processes, automates wherever required and gives constant support to monitor the key metrics using analytics. It helps in devising the action plans to be adopted with lesser cost and higher benefits.  

Based on the recent report shared by Gartner - It should also be noted that if nearly 50% of enterprises are looking to invest in analytics, another 50% are not. In fact, the CDO survey found that less than 50% of documented corporate strategies don’t mention data and analytics as key components for delivering enterprise value. The reason for this? According to Mike Rollings, Research VP at Gartner, the real reason is the limitations of traditional analytics offerings.

This calls for need of Principle #4: The Quicker You Let Go of Old Cheese, the Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese. (Adapt to change quickly). That is because traditional data and analytics strategies overlook the demands of digital business. Modern data and analytics serve a broader enterprise purpose and are more integrated into the ways people work than ever before, causing a new approach to data and analytics strategy to emerge. “IT leaders need to look at data first to succeed in their digital initiatives, rather than treating them as an afterthought to help with ad-hoc projects,” Rolling said during the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando.

With the new changes in the market scenario, it becomes vital to walk with the times and think beyond traditional ways. Principle #5: Move With the Cheese. (Change) – asserts the same to change and upgrade with the times. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have unfolded the new reigns of customer satisfaction, employee productivity improvement and governance to improve as and when new trends emerge. To deploy Data Science in your organization, following things pointers aid for better execution –

1. Build Organizational Structure and processes to be able to quickly and automatically collect, analyse, and act on available data.

2. Develop Analytics Leaders who bridge both data science with company strategy. Analytics leaders need to know enough about the business to ask the right questions of data.

3. Focus on Better Data, Not Big Data. Too often we see companies that are collecting data for data's sake, rather than taking a lean approach where they only collect data when it helps optimize the experience for their target customers, or better prediction of future behaviors.

4. Separate the Signal from the Noise as too many organizations ingest huge volumes of data without cleaning it, and then get garbage out from the garbage they put in (i.e., GIGO). The proliferation of new types of unstructured data adds fuel to the fire. This quandary can be avoided by developing a data quality plan and methodology.

Mindful approach towards implantation of Digital Transformation with Data Science and continuous learning with the emerging times is the only way to Principle #6: Savor the Adventure and Enjoy the Taste of New Cheese. The transformation from "HEM" mindset to "HAW" mindset, by acquiring the skills of "SNIFF & SCURRY" surely won’t qualify to be the sweet path to success, but certainly a worthy one and help you to grab your cheese.

Further reference: Summary of “Who Moved My Cheese” is best explained in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QmeWe2KoDs