Our team is busy gearing up for the Data Strategy & Insights 2019 Forum in about three weeks. My co-RD Gene Leganza and I are having some great speaker prep conversations, and we’ve been lucky to get a sneak peek into how these industry speakers are making an impact in their organizations by leading the charge to use data, analytics, and AI to improve customer experience, increase operational efficiencies, and create new products and services. I can’t wait for them to share their stories of real impact with all the attendees!

Our data tells the same story: 58% of respondents to the Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Data And Analytics Survey, 2019, tell us that their organizations have appointed a chief data officer, and another 26% are planning to do so. Last month, we published an infographic showing how these data leaders are generating positive business results for their companies and helping their companies become more insights-driven. Data and analytics leadership matters, and it is certainly one of the best times to be a data and analytics leader.

This month’s Insights Beat focuses on new research that helps different types of data and analytics leaders — customer insights leaders, retail leaders, app-dev leaders, and AI leaders — to drive business value in their organizations.

Customer Insights Leaders Adopt CLV To Drive Profitability

Customer insights leaders increasingly recognize the importance of calculating a more customer-focused metric like customer lifetime value (CLV) and infusing it throughout their businesses. Today, there is a renewed interest in using CLV to pursue both strategic and tactical goals. But the path to calculating CLV is complicated. Read our new, dual research reports on how to make CLV your Polaris for long-term growth and also how to adopt a progress-over-perfection mindset to the CLV calculations. If you are still early in your journey to customer analytics, take our updated assessment to help you chart your course to customer analytics maturity.

Retail Leaders Embrace Long-Term, Customer-Focused, And Predictive Metrics

Retailers are struggling to keep track of customers interacting, in different ways, across multiple digital and physical touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle. To really understand omnichannel performance, retailers need to extend their measurement over time, adding longer-term metrics like CLV to their performance dashboards. See our new research on how to evolve retail metrics to measure omnichannel performance effectively.

AppDev Leaders Help Build Analytics For Now

Many leading enterprises realize that real-time analytics — the analytics of the present — is an incredible competitive advantage because they can act now to serve fickle customers, fix operational problems, power internet-of-things apps, and respond decisively to competitors. That’s what streaming analytics delivers. See our latest evaluation on streaming analytics technologies.

AI Leaders Partner To Scale AI Transformation

AI is not something you can just buy off the shelf and configure. It is a system designed to bring humanlike intelligence to decisions and perform sophisticated and complex actions that past technology could not perform. To develop AI capabilities, firms need to partner with AI consultancies to help them transform and innovate across strategy, operations, culture, technology, analytics, and data. See our first evaluation of AI consultancies to understand the top players in this market and their capabilities, as well as an Asia Pacific-focused evaluation of this market.

That’s all for this month’s Insights Beat. Check out our latest research and stay tuned for more updates in November.

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