Da­ta col­lec­tion is im­por­tant but what is done with that in­for­ma­tion can tru­ly trans­form an en­ti­ty from or­di­nary to ex­tra­or­di­nary, says CEO of Trinidad Sys­tems Ltd (TSL) Stu­art Fran­co.

The com­pa­ny re­cent­ly part­nered with two lead­ing firms--Google Cloud and Soft­Serve—the lat­ter a soft­ware de­vel­op­ment and con­sult­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion—and TSL is now hop­ing to im­ple­ment its en­hanced ser­vices in­to the pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tors and even out­side of T&T.

Fran­co told the Busi­ness Guardian this coun­try is on the right track with its dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion thrust which must be sus­tained.

He cit­ed the ap­point­ment sys­tem at the li­cens­ing of­fices which dras­ti­cal­ly cuts down on the wait­ing time and al­lows peo­ple to con­duct trans­ac­tions in a more time­ly man­ner.

How­ev­er, Fran­co em­pha­sised that the key to be­ing ef­fec­tive is not on­ly hav­ing da­ta but prop­er com­pu­ta­tion and analy­sis and then ap­ply­ing this to help im­prove sys­tems.

“What it re­al­ly comes down to is da­ta. Every­body has da­ta but what are they do­ing with it? Where is the da­ta? What for­mat is it stored in? Are they us­ing that da­ta at all to make busi­ness de­ci­sions? That’s re­al­ly the con­ver­sa­tion you want to have,” Fran­co ex­plained.

It was on­ly two weeks ago at a re­cent pre­sen­ta­tion held at the Hy­att Re­gency ho­tel that Dr Hen­ry Bai­ley, of the De­part­ment of Eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, al­so spoke about the im­por­tance of us­ing da­ta prop­er­ly to im­prove T&T’s health sys­tems.

Not­ing that $12 bil­lion is spent an­nu­al­ly both in the pub­lic and pri­vate health sec­tors Bai­ley said process­es can be stream­lined even fur­ther if the cor­rect da­ta is plugged in­to the ap­pro­pri­ate places.

Health eco­nom­ics there­fore, Bai­ley had em­pha­sised, is a crit­i­cal an­a­lyt­i­cal tool which in­cor­po­rates the meth­ods of eco­nom­ics, the way of look­ing at prob­lems and ap­ply­ing so­lu­tions in health­care all us­ing da­ta and cov­er­ing a wide range of is­sues rang­ing from the cost of car­ing for each pa­tient on an ICU ward to the mon­ey spent year­ly on car­dio­vas­cu­lar surg­eries.

Apart from health, this con­cept can be ap­plied to all fields, busi­ness­es and oth­er­wise.

Fran­co gave fur­ther ex­am­ples of how us­ing da­ta-dri­ven con­cepts can not on­ly gen­er­ate more rev­enue but en­hance a com­pa­ny’s im­age and grow its cus­tomer base.

“Let’s take for ex­am­ple, in the pri­vate sec­tor where you have da­ta via all of your his­tor­i­cal in­voic­ing as to who your cus­tomers are and you should have their con­tact in­for­ma­tion. For ex­am­ple, if you know a fridge is go­ing to last some­one eight years and if I have the da­ta then I could run a util­i­ty that’s go­ing to see who bought a fridge eight or sev­en years ago and who may now be in the mar­ket for a new one. This in­for­ma­tion could now be passed on to the sales team,” Fran­co ex­plained.

He used an­oth­er ex­am­ple where sim­ply col­lect­ing in­for­ma­tion on dif­fer­ent ve­hi­cles and mak­ing this avail­able to the pub­lic can lead to more sales.

“A lot of peo­ple don’t want to go to mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions. If you start to digi­tise that process and you al­low peo­ple to see ve­hi­cles, learn about ve­hi­cles it ac­tu­al­ly starts build­ing up the mo­men­tum and you can end up get­ting more test dri­ves for ex­am­ple. Once they are get­ting a test dri­ve they are clos­er to the sale,” Fran­co said.

Be­ing da­ta-dri­ven how­ev­er, is not on­ly about in­come growth po­ten­tial.

There’s al­so the side of ef­fi­cien­cy.

Ac­cord­ing to Fran­co, busi­ness in­tel­li­gence and ma­chine learn­ing al­go­rithms can be set to learn and un­der­stand the en­vi­ron­ment and with every trans­ac­tion, this starts to im­prove and can pre­dict what will hap­pen, how it will hap­pen and when it will hap­pen.

Re­al-time de­ci­sions can al­so be made us­ing da­ta.

This can help fast-food out­lets, for ex­am­ple, im­prove de­liv­ery ser­vice and cre­ate an en­hanced cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence.

“If I have mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions and there’s an ac­ci­dent out­side of Diego Mar­tin but I was digi­tised and had all my peo­ple on a dig­i­tal plat­form I could blast a mes­sage in­form­ing them of the traf­fic sit­u­a­tion and ad­vis­ing that they may want to con­sid­er re-rout­ing to my oth­er out­lets in­stead,” Fran­co said.

All these and much more can be achieved in which TSL can play a part.

Re­gard­ing the part­ner­ships with Google Cloud and Soft­Serve Fran­co ex­plained that Google Cloud would spe­cialise in the in­fra­struc­ture, busi­ness in­tel­li­gence, in ma­chine learn­ing of all fea­tures and func­tions while the Soft­Serve re­la­tion­ship re­volves around the knowl­edge of process­es.

“What are cur­rent process­es, what are you try­ing to do more ef­fi­cient­ly… and is there any­thing we can au­to­mate in that process that would al­low you to save time and cost,” Fran­co fur­ther ex­plained.

This, he re­it­er­at­ed is a mas­sive op­por­tu­ni­ty to trans­form T&T’s dig­i­tal land­scape.

While he not­ed this dri­ve was be­ing pushed pri­or to the pan­dem­ic, the thrust will gain fur­ther mo­men­tum due to to­day’s de­mands.

“It will con­tin­ue to be dri­ven af­ter by the ‘new cus­tomer’ who is now in the work­force and who is al­so that new cus­tomer. They have to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent ex­pec­ta­tions of the ex­pe­ri­ence they want to have when work­ing with your busi­ness, what­ev­er it is, it doesn’t mat­ter.

“They want to jump from the phys­i­cal to the vir­tu­al seam­less­ly. It doesn’t mat­ter if it is a sin­gle in­ter­ac­tion with you. They need to be able to jump as they see fit. If you’re not able to of­fer that ex­pe­ri­ence to them, they feel let down and that is where the world is go­ing,” he said, not­ing that all en­ti­ties will be seek­ing to im­prove that cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence by digi­tis­ing it and mak­ing it more en­joy­able.

Not­ing that dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is not a des­ti­na­tion but rather a jour­ney Fran­co ad­vised com­pa­nies and or­gan­i­sa­tions to be cog­nisant of this.

“As you start to digi­tise and as you start to map it out and as you start to make changes, the on­ly thing that’s con­stant is change. As you’re mak­ing these changes you will re­alise you have to start to make oth­er changes...your busi­ness has to morph and once you un­der­stand that you have to start choos­ing lit­tle bites,” Fran­co added.