We live in an era where nothing is constant, where change is bound to happen, where we see disruptions killing businesses, everyday something new is invented or developed. In such a dynamic environment conventional management will no longer work and there is a need for reinventing management. In order to adapt to the changing customer needs, companies have to engage more deeply with people in their everyday work and lives through IT trends like artificial intelligence, internet of things and big data analytics. If you ask me what will happen if organizations don’t reinvent management, my answer will be in two words “they’ll die!” If you’re not able to reinvent the management style probably you will not be able to reinvent the organization. The fall of Kodak is an example where management failed in spite of technical expertise because the management didn’t understand the changing business environment and because of the old style of leadership.

Now the big question is how technology can be used for intelligent leadership decisions. Decision making always includes data as data-driven decisions perform significantly better but the barrier to such decision making is the lack of proper knowledge of analytics. Data alone is trivial and it is only when combined with the expertise and knowledge that data can enhance a manager’s capability to make the right decisions. Current generation managers equally need to know and understand analytics, combining it with their knowledge of the business. The Moneyball film truly demonstrates the use of analytics by baseball manager Billy Beane to identify undervalued players.

Pattern Analytics, which is a discipline of Big Data enables business leaders to understand how different variables of the business interact, their links with one another and helps them uncover patterns. Such patterns can indicate opportunities for innovation, expansion, and growth or threats of disruption for the business and help take corrective measures. Role of analytics is not limited to one activity rather companies can leverage analytics to improve decision making over a wide range of activities from customer segmentation, pricing, identifying new markets, effectively managing supply chains, detecting fraud channels, and creating efficiencies to improve operational effectiveness. Spain leading household cleaning company KH Lloreda used business intelligence in form of a dashboard initiative that helped management team to quickly understand information from all the areas of the company and a unified view of the company’s financial health. KH Lloreda implemented analytics capabilities very effectively and eliminated manual steps needed for end-period closing resulting in faster decision making by board members and management.

Analytics can help business leaders in making business strategies and functional strategy by getting insights from huge data generated by millions of past transactions. Leaders can identify product lines with more profit and acceptance by end customers, product lines that hurt overall profitability of the organization, and the data-driven insights can also enable the management in identifying weak supply chains and managing them effectively to reduce inefficiencies. Analytics is even used by management to analyse stakeholder conversations drawn from social media in its business. Big data analytics company Germin8 product Explic8 allows companies to analyse, predict and take the right decisions at right time.

Globalization has opened doors for business growth opportunities and has created so many suppliers, manufacturing units, logistics providers which resulted in complex supply chains that are not easy to monitor. Increase in product variance by globally dispersed customers, volatility in demand, and increase in cost fluctuations add to the problems of leaders from the supply chain industry. Analytical tools are now helping leaders across the organizations to tackle issues related to supply chain by providing valuable insights like true cost of raw materials rather than just price, supplier performance, potential supplier risk, potential fluctuations in demand etc. This way, supply chain analytics is helping leaders to make intelligent decisions and enhance the performance of supply chains by improving demand foresight, reducing cost fluctuations, supplier risk, and managing volatility. FedEx has collaborated with SAS to prepare its employees to arrive at effective decisions. UPS uses predictive analytics in form of a project which they call “Package Flow Technologies” to reduce the cost of daily operations by tracking the movement of every package making large improvements in fuel savings.

Role of analytics in entertainment and media industry like for video publishers, media owners, gaming companies, TV channels is way more important considering they have to create content which is suitable and customised for the end users or the customers. Investment decisions in media and entertainment industry are based on viewers’ habit, viewers’ ratings, number of views, geographic, and many other factors. Companies have to analyse all such factors before investing or launching any TV show. Analytics can help business leaders to answer such questions as it will provide insights likes viewing and consumption pattern, sales trends, territorial analysis, and even content pricing. The best example of such a company is Netflix whose management has built tremendous analytical capabilities to analyse millions of episodes a day, searches by their subscribers, content preference by the users as well as the time of the day when shows are watched and on what devices. Netflix leaders use insights from the analytics to refine their offerings and create content that is based on audience interest. It is said that bidding for blockbuster series House of Cards by Netflix was based on the insight that political fiction dramas were in highly trending patterns and because of the analytical capabilities, Netflix outbid its competitors like HBO to own the right of the show House of Cards.

The role of artificial intelligence or data analytics in people management or decisions involving employees will be even more demanding and challenging. HR leaders can address questions like what can make their employees motivated, which department is not happy with HR policies, what can be possible conflicts, what performance issues they may face, how can they improve employee productivity etc. Analytics though can’t help in removing all uncertainties but definitely can empower business leaders in making intelligent decisions which are less risky. Insights from analytics applied to the vast data that HR deals with can help management in fields like talent assessment, employee engagement, and team productivity. HR leaders have to identify the areas in their domain where they can implement the analytics and increase the efficiency. For e.g. Ideal is offering artificial intelligence tools and chatbot technology to automate time-consuming tasks such as resume screening, candidate sourcing etc. It is the HR leader’s responsibility to implement such analytical tools in their verticals so that their recruiting managers perform better and efficient.

Finally, I will conclude with the statement that we need leaders who can grasp the opportunities and can balance the cost and advantages of analytics and how human intelligence can best use artificial intelligence in solving business and customer problems.