The looming recession, layoffs, need for innovation, and the implosion of data.

These are not isolated situations, we are all experiencing this at the same point in time which is putting tremendous pressure on businesses and individuals. In the past, when the recession hit and an economic downturn took place, each of us went through similar challenges with certain broad guidelines on the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in that phase.

But today, the market situation is quite different. Like we experience climate change – hot, rainy, and colder seasons, all are haywire and sometimes all in one day, we are experiencing all types of situations in a single working day! How do you navigate through these extremely uncertain times? This question applies to businesses and professionals alike.

The most predicted approach toward recession is to preserve cash, not to expand if not necessary, do more with fewer resources and which leads to layoffs. Keeping the lights on and tie over the situation, till the time demand pickups, up is the standard template to address the recession.

We are already witnessing large-scale layoffs by big and small companies. Big tech companies, not just FANGs but also enterprise software companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle have carried out large-scale layoffs. They are bracing themselves for a slowdown in demand and preparing for preserving the cash. The smaller companies are carrying out the layoffs, on one hand, due to slowdown, but also due to investors’ reluctance to put in cash. When you don’t have access to cash, your ability to hire and expand is limited, rather you have to let go of manpower and save cash.

These are very standard responses to the recession and economic slowdown. But interestingly we are also witnessing innovation and new ways of doing things all around us. The technologies, trends, and approaches like AI, mobile, decentralization, customer experience, real-time analytics, and actions have created new ways of growing the business. These approaches are creating demands for more innovations and driving a change in the processes. There are many examples around us – mobile payments, digitalization of the entire supply chain, recommendation engines, personalized advertising, targeted marketing, etc.

If you notice the above trends and technologies, the underlying foundation for success lies in the movement and use of Data effectively. Even in these uncertain times, what is certain about success is how well you make use of the data.

We have been witnessing data being created at an exponential pace (xxxxx datapoint). But the key to success lies in how well you use this data. According to some surveys (data point), 90% of data is being purged and not touched at all. While everyone knows the importance of data, not every company is in a position of capturing it and processing it, in time, to help the business grow.
The financial industry has been facing this problem even more than any other business. Industry players have many systems to capture transactions and over the last ten years, especially, the data-generating applications have simply mushroomed. And then the financial industry has to collaborate with the ecosystem players – third-party loan providers, KYC providers, bill payment systems, wallets, and payment processors, insurance resellers. The amount of data being generated with every touch point is exponential. It is not just the transactional data, but the contextual data generated that matters even more for analytics and decision-making.

Only those businesses would be able to do better or survive who would be able to leverage these data. These organizations have to build agile and nimble systems that can help in decision-making in almost real-time. Just having systems that capture a massive amount of data, but takes time to process is not good enough. In many cases, the action taken based on the data analytics is too late because data processing took a long time. What matters is how fast you can take action, which in turn means, how well is your data being processed.

In the coming days, when we are witnessing all weather conditions at the same time – looming recession, slowdown, innovation, what is going to matter is the organization’s ability to process massive data, in double quick time at an affordable price point. The budgets are going to be squeezed but demand for real-time analytics is going to increase. The answer to that conundrum is to use open-source technologies even more. We will talk about ways and means of building an efficient data pipeline using open-source technologies in the upcoming event in Mumbai.