About a decade ago, the startups embraced the cloud because it helped them with speed, agility and cost.
The big enterprises took note of their success.
Under an IT led, top down strategic push, they took some of their existing servers, storage and processing and moved it to the cloud. When that worked, they moved a bit more. And then a bit more. With each iteration they shaved off a few percentages from their infrastructure costs.
This is what I call the 10% thinking.
Today’s economy provides multiple digital touch points. This includes the social media, online advertisement, e-commerce, audio files from call center logs as well as thank you letters received by post. The data is varied (scanned letters, audio/video files, website logs etc). The quality of the data is not uniform. The biggest challenge is that the data cannot be easily connected. You cannot map the cookie data with purchase data with your traditional tools.
The cloud offers you tools to combine this data, clean it and make predictions on it.
Some companies have created specialized data science teams to analyze the different data sources and build new products or features.
I call them the 100% thinkers. They combine 10% bottomline cost savings with 90% topline revenue growth.
The true winners of tomorrow are a step further ahead. They have understood that specialised data science teams are important, but not scalable. That the biggest benefit of the cloud is in the democratisation of analytics and machine learning. They have enabled every single team to use the power of data. These teams are running multiple predictive experiments using readily available autoML features and when somethings work, they quickly roll them out through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) features of the cloud.
An elite commando unit will be able to make some quick strikes but a better equipped army with modern tools will win many more battles and gain much more ground (or marketshare).
That, to me, is 10x thinking.
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