The importance of quality and timely data analysis in the digital age

Tell me about Intuita, your role and your responsibilities there?

Our Managing Partner, Lasse, spoke to AI Magazine about the importance of high-quality and timely data analysis in the digital age, and our plans for the future of Intuita.

Intuita is a UK-based data solutions and analytics provider which helps large organisations build sustainable and future-proof data ecosystems that drive transformative insights. Our team comprises data leaders with vast experience in solving complex data problems and supporting businesses to adopt a data-driven culture. We work by understanding our clients’ IT environments, helping to diagnose their core issues and building the roadmap to reach the desired goals, with quality and transparency at the heart of what we do.

I ama Managing Partner and Co-Founder, having joined Glenn Merritt a year after he established Intuita; together we decided to see if we could build a business built around a shared ethos of quality and delivery. I am responsible for analytical and data projects, project leadership and client management to ensure that the overall quality of delivery is of the highest calibre. Within the management team I support decision-making around strategic priorities, people and project delivery, and am focused on the on-going exploration around the potential of Business Intelligence (BI), Data and Analytics.

Why do you think data and analytics are so important as companies become more digital?

Data and analytics have always been important to companies, even before the digital age. The digital age has just vastly increased the breadth, depth and timeliness of data that is now available to companies. It has meant businesses now have the potential to get granular and instant data about customers, operations, employees and the market. As the tools and technologies to generate and access this sort of data have become more prevalent, so has the appetite of businesses to mine the data for better insights to drive efficiencies and performance across all business functions. This then drives competitiveness. It is this drive to be competitive which makes data and analytics so important, now and in the future, as companies become more digital.

How do you support customers as they look to analyse large influxes of data?

We support customers in a number of ways – from the data engineering side of the business we ensure that organisations have the right systems and capabilities in place to properly ingest, store and process data in a cost efficient, controlled but scalable way. We work on ensuring data quality within the data ecosystems, carrying out a Data Excellence assessment and working with customers to optimise their data management processes. This includes looking at metadata management, reference and master data, data literacy and data modelling and design. This stage is vital to ensure the organisation has the right data strategy and capabilities in place to deal with the demands of a data-driven organisation. Once data systems and data quality are producing high quality, available data, we then help businesses to analyse this data to generate insights which help to drive the business forward. We support businesses to ensure they continue to refine and evolve their data ecosystem to support new types of data, and new ways of using that data.

Can you outline any specific applications where your solution / services have transformed a customer's operations?  

We worked with a UK high street retail brand to create a secure environment to curate and build centralised benchmarking capability across multiple company inputs. Similar to a franchise, the business has numerous organisations operating in isolation with differing technologies and levels of data maturity, but ultimately the same product offering. Our first challenge was to ensure the right level of data literacy across the independent organisations whilst clearly and effectively communicating the benefits that a centralised environment would bring; it would result in a fully managed, cloud-based data pipeline with in-built data quality controls and impactful visualisations. These outputs not only enabled the independent organisations to benchmark effectively against one another, but also challenged the way they operated from a product range point of view. Furthermore, our solutions provided them with a truer understanding of performance, both in terms of geographical variations as well as situational impacts, such as pandemic effects on shopping behaviour.

What is next for Intuita, what can we expect in the future?

Our focus is on developing more partnerships and building on our existing deep relationships, which are based on trust and understanding of our clients’ and partners’ core businesses. The next phase of our evolution is to find ways to more effectively market the benefits of doing things well at the deepest levels of data to far more businesses. In this, we see a return to some of the old-world values of sorting out a company’s data fundamentals and culture to enable success in the new world.

Partly due to the pandemic, we now have an operating model with strong foundations capable of handling rapid expansion. We see a world of opportunities for businesses like Intuita – those that understand the benefits of having a deep affinity with data and how data excellence can transform and improve an organisation.