Globally, we continue to face greater uncertainty and complexity as we are forced to navigate the evolution of the digital world. Organisations are required to tackle today’s challenges and prepare for the future in parallel, turning to data to improve decision making and performance – and to achieve the most value possible.
However, short-term or ad hoc approaches when looking to data are not achieving that value.
The landscape is complex, from rapidly evolving technology and blending legacy systems with new layers of capability to the pressures of moving to a single source of truth and confusion around the role of people. These challenges are often mistakenly tackled either with more and more data (without knowing how to differentiate between good and bad quality or value), or investing in technology to manage and collect data, which doesn’t directly correlate with how a business is performing.
Combined, these common ‘mistakes’ create a chasm – how can your business improve by following an ambiguous digital roadmap? This risks redundant investments and accumulating a whole raft of information that doesn’t even move the needle.
Achieving the most value from assets requires new ways of thinking, such as building a proactive and predictive vision of your ‘digital Estate’. The starting point is to first understand what really drives business value, then linking that with data, technology and asset management. Data determined with purpose, connected to performance, and accelerated with technology, provides power to decision makers.Through such data you increase transparency, the next best thing to certainty.
How can data analytics and information management identify what’s important for your Estate, and help calibrate operations better to achieve your goals? Those organisations constantly challenging the answers to these questions are the ones making the largest, and most rapid gains. They have a clear understanding of what drives their business performance (the purpose), their vision of digitisation is clearer (as it is assisted by the purpose), and they see people as critical to achieving higher value.
But value differs from one asset intensive industry to another. In aviation, it may be passenger volume; for the energy sector, it could mean cost per megawatt-hour. In Defence it may be mission-ready status, an agile and future-ready force, or tracking utilisation efficiency – knowing what’s available, where it is and what can be called upon.
Whatever the driver, if the value and desired outcome is not understood, it becomes difficult to know where to focus attention, where to collect data, to whom to report information, where to prioritise decisions, and where performance matters. If you don’t know what your data is telling you, how do you define what it’s good for? If you do know what you are looking to achieve, it gets the line of priorities right and informs how technology and data should be approached for your business.
Organisationsleading the way in their use of technology and data to realise more value from their Estate have three key things in common:
- Focus on developing a better business, not a better asset: To understand how to move, you need to clarify where the value lies and what interdependent variables directly contribute towards the overall success of your organisation. The key is to optimise assets, rather than maximise.
- Valuing people and digital (processes, systems, data) in decision making: true value realisation from data and technology comes from judgement intensive tasks - where people remain equally important compared to technology. When combined and understood correctly, this provides organisations with more power, rather than taking it away.
- Going deep and not skirting around the edges: Go deep to where the value is to be found – have the resilience and discipline to make digital ways of working part of the everyday, and a key part of creating a sustainable and effective business.
Across the Defence sector, decisions about capabilities today will determine capacity to manage the challenges of the future. This underlies the importance of taking a strategic, long-term and connected view when it comes to decisions around data and assets. Identifying the assets that drive value requires connecting clear business purpose, data and the assets themselves. Each can no longer be approached in silos.
Note: Chris Needham is Defence Digital Leader for Aurecon and Elisha Bellchambers is Director for Quartile One Asset Performance, part of Aurecon.