Strategic Business Decisions Consulting
Unleashing the Power of Data

Data is the compass that guides organizations through the thickets of the digital jungle. With data emerging as the key business driver in this digital era, organizations are increasingly prioritizing the application of data analytics. Enterprises are seeking to hone their competitive edge by gleaning actionable insights from massive volumes of data they have at their disposal. Today, companies are hyper-focused on consistent data visualization, storytelling, and reporting to ace the data game. And herein lies the value of robust analytical tools that can unlock the hidden business value within data. Enter Strategic Business Decisions Consulting.

Strategic Business Decisions Consulting, a management consulting firm, leverages state-of-the-art data analytics and data management solutions to help enterprises make strategic and informed business decisions. With “focus on excellence” being its cornerstone, the company is committed to steering its clients toward success.

In an interview with the editorial team of CIO Applications, Barry Massoudi, Managing Partner at Strategic Business Decisions Consulting, discusses at length how his company empowers businesses to optimize operational performance, drive growth, mitigate risks, and enhance customer satisfaction with advanced data analytics.

Could you provide an overview of your company?

Strategic Business Decisions Consulting was founded in 2012 to promote better decision-making for corporate managers and entrepreneurs by applying the advances in brain science to the discipline of economic decision-making. Often, decision-makers are presented with incomplete or poorly organized data, compelling them to make decisions by merely relying on their judgment to figure out the best course of action to move forward with. By leveraging their data, we help organizations make better business decisions.

From your perspective, how has the business landscape changed today, and what should companies and CIOs do to stay updated and relevant?

The business ecosystem has been completely upended in the wake of the pandemic, and we’ve been seeing unprecedented changes happening in 2020. Amidst all these changes, leading research organizations suggest that data analytics is one of the top five issues that CIOs are dealing with. Many existing trends are now accelerating, and data analytics is one of the subjects that is on the top of mind for CIOs heading into 2021. In this context, we have two things to focus on. Firstly, the role of a CIO has been changing over the past few years; CIOs are now more responsible for bringing technology and business together to drive innovation and accelerate business transformation while tapping into revenue creation opportunities. CIOs are also looking to adopt new technologies to reduce costs, increase productivity, and create better customer experiences.

Secondly, the pandemic has permanently changed our relationship with technology. Today, most people can work from anywhere at their convenience. People can rely on online shopping, remote medicine and virtually meet and interact with others through technology. These trends will continue to accelerate in 2021 and beyond, and many of these changes are going to be permanent. As a result, companies must innovate to create new business models, partner with vendor organizations to meet the varying needs of their customers, and bolster their digital transformation initiatives.

As organizations rapidly make the leap to digital, they are faced with a deluge of data. Data analytics provides a huge opportunity for companies to use the data more effectively and drive significant revenue growth. Companies that lagin adopting data analytics will fall behind. Today, data analytics plays a pivotal role in maintaining a competitive edge in this fast-changing landscape.

While companies increasingly move to the cloud and shift their workloads, technologies like Responsible AI and business process automation gain traction. Also, now more than ever, the experiences of a company’s customers, employees, and partners are becoming integrated instead of being siloed. Data analytics is a key part and an enabler of these transformations. The ability to achieve predictive and prescriptive results through actionable data is becoming more imperative. Companies must use their historical data to better forecast and drive to automate some decision-making processes. At the same time, as companies move to distributed cloud services, ensuring the security and privacy of data becomes crucial. In this age, companies must ensure that they’re adding value by leveraging their tangible as well as intangible assets—their people and data—effectively to be competitive.

How does your company help businesses thrive in the ever-changing market?

Today, more than ever, companies must ensure that their business model is relevant and adds value to the business. Companies need to understand their customer journey and pain points. Data analytics is an apt tool they can use for these purposes. We help organizations capture, integrate, visualize, and analyze data to gain actionable insights so that they can make better decisions and unlock hidden business value.

Our company follows a reliable project management approach for building and managing various types of data. By developing visualization dashboards, we help our clients gain insights from the data for effective storytelling. We work closely with our clients as we manage the end-to-endproject life cycle that includes facilitating visualization design workshops, capturing inputs from users, prototyping our designs, accessing and cleaning the data, stabilizing and testing the dashboards, and maintaining and updating the dashboards. Also, we work with our clients to train their users so that we can transfer the work that we have done to them effectively. Further, we help our clients extract valuable insights by using tools like Power BI, AzureDevOps, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), SQL, Python, and more.

Our goal is to work with our clients to deliver the analytics and data that can help them make impactful decisions. To achieve this, we first understand their business and ensure that the insights we deliver is actionable. The data plays an integral role in predicting and forecasting their business challenges. We begin by understanding the clients’ requirements and goals, whether it is to reduce costs, improve productivity, enhance customer experiences, or integrate processes, and then map out the right strategy before we create reports and dashboards for them. We work side by side with our clients within the scope of their requirements and develop solutions together, set the right expectations for the deliverables, and manage the project. We also guide our clients to take the right actions to over come the challenges that exist or might arise.

Could you cite a customer success story?

One of our clients that provides software solutions for major enterprises was looking to create a better customer experience every time they released new software. We helped them build an end-to-end customer journey map, identify key transition points, and looked into their historical defects and failures affecting customer experience. Then we helped them visualize the data and developed a predictive model. This model helped them improve those areas of software development and integration to prevent future failures when they release new software. After partnering with us, they were able to mitigate issues, and consequently, fewer support calls and lower costs of support. They could eventually enhance their customer experience, increase retention, bolstering customer confidence to accept and adopt new versions of complex software systems.

How do you envision the future?

Business processes are continuing to become more digitalized and, subsequently, data-centric. Additionally, the increasing shift to the cloud and round-the-clock availability of data for analysis is transforming the business landscape. We look to align our solutions with these trends to help businesses stay competitive and relevant. Also, Responsible AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics are creating a huge impact on businesses. Incorporating these advanced technologies in our future projects, we aim to expand into new industry verticals like healthcare to improve decision-making, reduce costs, and drive better out comes for patients with advanced analytics.