(Jeremy Vale and Paolo Santamaria contributed to this post.)

This month’s Insights Beat focuses on the latest research in our insights-driven playbook; showcases multiple data, analytics, and machine-learning vendor evaluations; and shines a light on B2B analytics techniques.

Is Your Data Strategy Lacking? Time To Sound The Alarm

In order to compete in the age of the customer, your data strategy must be top-flight. The vast majority of firms come up short in this regard, with fewer than 10% of firms sustaining competitive advantage through mature systems of insight. Last month we honed in on B2B and B2B2C firms and found specifically that many of these companies need to rebalance or up their investment in analytics to deliver on a variety of business-critical outcomes.

Lean On Your Wingman

The journey to insights-driven business can be daunting — but you’re not alone in this endeavor. This past month, we bolstered our research portfolio with new reports for the insights-driven business playbook. Cinny Little published updated reports on the goal-KPI-action-data (GKAD) framework and outlined four essential steps to transform your business to be insights-driven. It may not always seem like clear skies ahead; a commitment to transformation may even require enterprises to fundamentally rethink and reorganize the way they structure, store, and use their data. Using our new big data fabric 2.0 framework, enterprises can begin to democratize data companywide.

Give Your Tech Portfolio Wings

Many firms have begun to pivot toward AI to fuel their insights-driven journey, with 62% of global data and analytics professionals reporting that they are just getting started on delivering AI models. And indeed, there are a variety of AI, automation, and robotics technologies, for both customers and employees, available to aid the modern business.

In just this past month, our team generated a veritable tsunami of Forrester Wave™ evaluations on new and emerging technologies. From automation-focused machine-learning solutions to cognitive search to customer analytics service providers, firms are increasingly ready to wade through the tide of data in today’s technological landscape.

And as companies begin to wade through data, understanding available digital intelligence tools and the ability to leverage these tools cannot be understated in this age of the customer. It’s time to take your data strategy to new heights. Check out our latest research and stay tuned for more next month.

Note: You will need a Forrester subscription to access research featured and linked in this post.