The Singapore government recently announced several business support measures to help businesses defray the costs and risks of innovation as corporate purse strings tighten. The enhancements to the National Productivity Grant, newly minted Enterprise Innovation Scheme, and other initiatives announced during the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s Committee of Supply debate underscore the importance of businesses remaining competitive to stay resilient in an uncertain economic climate.
As Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong mentioned, an “era of zero-sum thinking has begun”. In the race to become resilient, many businesses default to cost-cutting measures, tightening spending and reducing investments in innovation efforts to focus on short-term operational efficiency. However, marginalising innovation is likely to be detrimental to long-term business success.
Organisational resiliency need not come at the cost of innovation. By learning to evolve and adapt to new ways of working quickly, businesses can develop the necessary organisational muscles to withstand changes in the environment to survive and thrive, even in difficult times.
Beyond resiliency to antifragility
“Antifragile” is defined as a category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. Made popular by a book of the same name by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, being antifragile is beyond resilience and robustness. A resilient business resists shocks and stays the same; an antifragile business improves, evolves and becomes stronger.
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In applying the “antifragile” concept to organisations, it is apparent that there are many areas that they can improve on, including the diversification of products, services, and channels, acceleration of digital transformation efforts that include the automation of processes and manual tasks, and establishing an innovative, agile data practice that harnesses data to inform quicker learning during innovation loops for better business decisions at all levels within the organisation.
An antifragile business is always learning from the environment it is in. The more data it can gather, the better its ability to harness them to make better decisions. To do so requires an effective data strategy that allows the organisation to derive key actionable insights from data in a timely, accurate, secure, and manner for data-driven decisions that can help drive operational efficiencies and improve business outcomes.
Treating data as a strategic business asset with its own comprehensive strategy aligned to business priorities can help businesses adapt and evolve regardless of the market condition to achieve true antifragility.
In the digital era, data is ‘the new gold’
Enterprise data is growing at an explosive rate, driven by accelerated digital transformation and increased customer touchpoints. By 2025, IDC predicts that 80 per cent of data collected worldwide will be unstructured, presenting immense opportunities for organisations to store, analyse, collect and gain insights and potentially monetise the data.
According to Cloudera’s Enterprise Data Maturity report, 91 per cent of IT decision-makers believe that their organisation’s data strategy was key to increasing resilience. A well-considered data strategy identifies the main challenges or opportunities that the organisation is trying to solve, while including a set of guiding principles or policies for dealing with them and a coherent set of actions. It is also aligned with the organisation’s cloud and digital strategies and outlines the modern data architectures needed to leverage data across the organisation’s hybrid multi-cloud environments.
To effectively execute the data strategy requires tools equipped with modern technologies that can manage disparate data sets in a consistent, secure, and governed manner across the entire data lifecycle, no matter where the data resides. Being able to do this while providing shared security and governance features across different cloud environments is critical.
A robust hybrid data platform guided by a deliberate data strategy is essential in building trust that the data is fit for purpose to provide business leaders with the confidence in using the data to guide business decisions.
Data powering growth opportunities
Together, a data strategy backed by a hybrid data platform leveraging modern architectures can help organisations uncover new growth opportunities, by applying technologies like automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning for increased time to insights.
For example, one of the largest financial services groups in Southeast Asia saw the opportunity to leverage data and machine learning to deliver innovative banking services that catered to consumers’ preferences for digital-first banks.
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They built a centralised platform that uses machine learning to analyse real-time contextual data from customer conversations to identify the most relevant information for each customer and curate personalised experiences across communication channels.
The bank also used machine learning to predict several bank systems’ potential time to failure, ensuring that information technology teams could take preemptive decisions to keep data centres always up and running. The machine learning models have helped the bank to reduce the risk of losing sensitive customer data, such as financial details, and avoid costly regulatory fines from downtime. More importantly, it created a faster and more efficient transaction experience for its customers.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
Getting value from data can be both complex and complicated. Data often needs to be brought together from multiple sources, secured, curated and processed. This needs to be done at scale, across rich datasets and increasingly in real-time. Having a clear, unified and reliable view of all data assets is foundational to having informed decisions with high degrees of confidence.
Furthermore, being able to implement modern data architectures such as Data Fabric, Data Mesh and Data Lakehouse across public clouds and on-premises provides the greatest flexibility to organisations. These qualities are core principles of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).
The challenges and obstacles from evolving external factors present opportunities for businesses to harness one of their most valuable and underutilised assets, data, to make informed decisions and flourish in any market condition.
A strong data strategy and the ability to innovate effectively and respond quickly are foundational to the antifragile organisation. I believe that technology and agile innovative data practices will play an important role in supporting this in 2023 and beyond.
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In general, tech roles such as software engineering, product, and data science will continue to be sought-after in Southeast Asia. To fill the gap, we see three trends. One is that while salaries continue to increase, the growth rate will be much lower than in previous years from upwards of 30 per cent to 10-20 per cent per annum. So, for startups that are in a good position, now is a good time to hire strong tech talent.
