Why an Insights Engine Is Essential to Business Resilience

If there’s one theme many of us are encountering in budget planning for 2023, it’s that we need to be prepared to both increase efficiency and make smart investments that will help our organizations and people be resilient in the face of an economic downturn. And for research teams that haven’t yet developed an insights engine, that will need to be a key investment area.

We define an insights engine as a combination of the right people, technology, and processes to increase the accessibility, visibility, and utility of data and insights. When your insights engine is firing on all cylinders, it should be delivering insights to your stakeholders in a format they can easily understand and use. Stakeholders should have on-demand access to the knowledge they need to make informed decisions, rather than having to wait on an individual or team to retrieve that knowledge for them.

So what does an insights engine have to do with business resilience? In short, an insights engine allows organizations to avoid wasting existing resources while also making smarter, more informed decisions coming down to these main factors:

• Reducing risk by preserving knowledge and insights
• Freeing up your insights team to move faster
• Increasing the use of insights in decision-making
• Uncovering opportunities for innovation

Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits.

Reducing Risk by Preserving Knowledge and Insights

47.8 million U.S. workers quit their jobs last year, easily eclipsing the previous record of 3.5 million in 2019. And whether you think this trend will continue into 2023 or not, the fact is that any amount of employee turnover can negatively impact your team, especially when you lose a long-tenured employee with lots of institutional knowledge.

Consider the market researcher who has been with your organization for several years and has taken on a de facto librarian role, helping other team members and stakeholders locate existing research simply because they were around when it was conducted or purchased and know where it lives. If they leave your company, they take their knowledge with them, and less tenured team members are left trying to figure out what your organization already knows.

A key component of an insights engine is technology that 1.) brings your research and insights into one central location and 2.) makes everything searchable. This enables you to preserve existing knowledge so that even if your entire team walked out the door tomorrow, new team members would have access to everything the organization already knows, saving them from duplicating existing research or wasting time searching through multiple portals and repositories for answers.

Freeing Up Your Insights Team to Move Faster

During periods of economic uncertainty, research and insights teams are often asked to do more with less. Your headcount might stay the same while you are asked to conduct research and deliver your findings within shorter timeframes. In this scenario, it’s essential that your team is able to work as efficiently as possible–and you can’t work efficiently if your stakeholders are regularly calling on your team members to answer the same questions or surface the same resources.

I recently participated in a GreenBook webinar with Paul Ponsford of Delta Faucet Company, and he said that one of the surprising benefits of having an insights engine was that it reduced the number of one-off questions his team had to field. Their stakeholders could simply go to their insights management platform and enter a keyword or research question to see what information was already available on the subject. As a result, the insights team got more time back to focus on impactful activities, from planning and conducting research to providing strategic recommendations to the business.

Increasing the Use of Insights in Decision-Making

Being a resilient business isn’t just about being able to weather difficult times: it’s about being able to adapt, identify new opportunities, and outperform competitors, in both good and bad economic climates. And to do this, businesses need to lean on their data and insights.

According to Forrester Research, organizations that centralize their insights and make data-driven decisions:

• Are eight times more likely than their less advanced peers to say they grew revenue by 20% or more
• Use insights to discover new sources of revenue and create market differentiation
• More frequently commercialize their data

Without an insights engine, insights can easily become siloed within a single team or department, and research that could benefit the wider organization often never makes it farther than the line manager who commissioned it. By centralizing insights and making them accessible to stakeholders across the business, research teams increase the likelihood that those stakeholders will leverage insights in their decision-making–allowing their organization to be more competitive regardless of economic conditions.

Uncovering Opportunities for Innovation

Building a resilient organization requires bringing together people who can think creatively–and make smart decisions to help the business adapt when necessary. An insights engine centralizes the knowledge and insights of an organization and encourages people to continue building on it–whether that’s through comments on a research report, Q&A, or feedback sessions. Different decision-makers from across the organization may uncover new research questions or identify new opportunities based on the information available to them, ultimately allowing the entire organization to be more adaptable and innovative.

We know that the market is cyclical. There are good times and bad–and neither lasts forever. Fortunately, an insights engine can help you build resilience to increase your organization’s chances of success in either scenario.