My prior post reflected a discussion of economic trends among CEOs at the September 13th program conducted by the National Association of Corporate Directors/New England Chapter. One major theme, demanding its own separate treatment, had to do with the importance of big data.
Simply put, the CEOs of all three diverse companies (an international financial service firm, a regional utility firm and an online consumer goods vendor) agreed strongly on one thing: companies which win will make the most effective use of big data to drive efficiency in operations and marketing.
This is why average age of employees at Wayfair is 28 or 29 years. The same, interestingly, is true at State Street. In Wayfair, they hire tech-smart people even if they don’t have business training. At State Street, there is a major program to digitize and analyze all information coming in and out. According to CEO Hooley, this program had its source with Alibaba, the Chinese online retailer with 400,000,000 customers which realized it was collecting incredible data about its customers, and set up banking and financial services businesses because they could not ignore the value of that data.
At National Grid, CEO Reed noted that while the firm has many people who dig trenches and erect poles, they also have a substantial investment in data concerning energy usages which informs reducing costs and reducing customer usage. “We even have data on what poles will fall over in our next storm.” She also observed that social media is changing the manner in which the utility communicates with customers.
All seemed to agree that Hooley’s assessment of the future of State Street also applied to their own companies: “We will be in the business of data analytics.”