Oz du Soleil provided some fond memories of the Conference. What did he learn from Mico Yuk’s keynote? How will he use pictures to articulate his data stories? Find the answers here. Meanwhile, financial analysis expert Othniel Denis shared three key takeaways from the Conference, including two new tools in Excel, thinking beyond the trend, and six tenets of financial analytics, here.

What can we draw from this finding? There is ambition to become the data-driven organization, but what is the business value in doing so?

Making data-based decisions is the fourth wave of business value. The first waves were computers, then the Internet, then mobile applications, and then, finally, the enabler that underpins each of the other waves - data. Businesses need to change and adapt to meet the challenges of the fourth wave.  However, organisations can't be in a position to know how to change or adapt, if they don't know where they are in the first place.

Andrew Grove wrote a book Only the Paranoid Survive, which discusses how Intel survived change after change in the computing industry. Grove had a very interesting idea: businesses are affected by six forces, both internal and external:

• existing competition
• complementary businesses
• customers
• potential customers
• possibility of alternative ways of achieving the same end
• suppliers

However, what happens if any of the forces increase or decrease in terms of their pressure? Can this change turn into an inflection point? An inflection point is illustrated below, courtesy of Wolfram Mathworld. 

In other words, the inflection point is where the curvature of a line goes from negative to positive.

Translated into business terms, this can be considered as part of a maturity process, whereby the immature company goes through a turbulent ‘adolescence’, to reach maturity.

Grove proposed that, if these forces stayed equivalent, that the company will steer a steady course. It also does not mean that the energy and factors that got you to where you are now, will necessarily be the forces that take you to where you want to go. How can businesses tell if they are on the inflection point, or above or below the curve, if they don't properly analyze the data? How can they steer a steady course without the navigational path, the starcourse that points them in the right direction, based on the evidence?

If the organization is truly undergoing a disruptive phase, then business analysis will help to find the right data to understand the voices contained in the data. They will need to understand both internal and external forces. If there is a will for organizations to become data-driven organizations, then senior management will need to lead the way, using the data to help them to ride the fourth wave of Business Value.

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