Amritpal Slaich 0:05
Hello my name is Amrit Slage and this is.
Alison Lawson 0:09
Hello, my name is Alison Lawson.
Amritpal Slaich 0:12
And we're here from Derby University to present to you a short presentation and talk regarding digital transformation and skills.
So firstly, we'd like to welcome you all from Derby Business School, Derby University. We're both from the School of Marketing and Operations. Allison, would you like to say a little bit about yourself, please?
Alison Lawson 0:39
Yes. So my journey to where I am today involved working for many years in the book publishing industry and I did my PhD back in the early 2000s about digital transformation in the industry. And that's where my interest in this subject and my research in this subject has stemmed from and the particular.
Technological innovations at the time that were causing much unease in the.
Publishing industry were ebooks which were on the horizon and at the time they were widely predicted to be the new technology that was going to kill the printed book. It was the death of the book as we knew it, and I'm sure that you are aware that printed books have not died and in fact there are more than ever available to us across all different subject matters.
Also, are the technologies at the time that were really important and were threatening the industry was digital printing?
And this was as opposed to standard 4 colour printing using enormous printing presses that took up masses of space and cost a lot of time and money to house and to maintain and to operate. And digital presses were much shorter. There was a lot of stuff in the industry around. It wasn't as good quality as as as four colour printing presses and so on, but obviously that improved over time and so that was a threat to the printing industry and indeed many.
Printing houses did go.
Under, because the threat of digital printing and the third technology that I was looking at at that time was print on demand. So rather than printing enormous print runs all in one go.
Then storing those books in warehouses are ready for sale. Publishers could then print only what they needed for immediate sale, and then sell those and reprint when the stock was running low, which reduced their costs in terms of storing. So those three technologies were at that time new and was sending shockwaves throughout the publishing industry and it's related industries.
Printing book, selling, packaging, distribution, warehouse.
And it was an area where people just had to react. They had to deal with it. These technologies weren't going to go away. And what I found was that there was huge impact in terms of the skills and knowledge that was required by individuals employed in the publishing industry. And that changed the way that we recruited it, changed the way that we deployed our staff. It changed the internal teams that we used. It changed our management structures. It changed our client and supply relationships so that it was a huge impact.
And that is what interested me in the whole digital transformation and skills area and that is why I am here today. That's me. Over to you, hamrid.
Amritpal Slaich 3:28
Thank you very much. Now, thank you and my background, my background. I mean I have worked in industry many years ago, but I've also got a quantitative business analytical background.
More recently, having joined Derby University, I've seen a lecture in operations management with business technology within what we talk about in terms of digital transformation.
Data becomes very important and what you do with that data, which we will discuss in due course is very key to to what businesses can do to help in.
Kind of make more effective decisions. So we'll look at a range of techniques and what value data adds to businesses as part of this digital transformation, which I think you will all find very interesting.
Alison Lawson 4:16
Thanks, samrets. So let's move on.
The aim of today's session is to develop your knowledge of data management and security to provide insights into how to use digital tools and data analytics in ways to significantly boost your organisation performance and how to manage data in a Safeway. Because we all have so much data these days is how do we manage it in a safe and secure way.
Amritpal Slaich 4:26
Sorry, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, all sessions that we deliver at university, we have we we want to have a clear set of aims just to make sure that by the by the end of the session, we want to make sure that we've actually fulfilled that the purpose for what this session is for and that's what we're trying to state clearly right at the start.
So you would have received.
E-mail about some pre session activities. There were three things that you were sent information about. One was a digital transformation which was a link. Alison. Can you remind me what the the link was?
Alison Lawson 5:23
Yes, it's a link to a very interesting article, a trade article from McKinsey about what digital transformation is and what it means and what its impact is. It's a really good short read. It will only take you a few minutes to read it if you haven't done it already. We know that doing pre session activity is sometimes challenging to find the time, but we do encourage you to read that small article and if you may also find it's useful to send on to colleagues if you're trying to summarise and give them some ideas about.
Thing we've covered today. So that's what that article is.
Amritpal Slaich 5:56
And the second link is about risks and certainties and vulnerabilities. So as as businesses transform, there's they're more data, the data side or how you store the data, how you secure it becomes more critical. So there's a link to five biggest GDPR fines in 2024. It's more of a wake up call, but we also, as part of this lecture, we talk about GDPR and the fines, but it's really to lead us into what can organisations what can SMEs do.
To safeguard themselves, protect their data. So we'll give you some very useful hyperlinks later on.
And then we've got Mr Hans Rosling, who's a short video which is about basically saying, is that how can businesses use their data? What does that data reveal? What are the some of the parameters and what kind of decisions, what kind of knowledge, what kind of Nuggets of information can you extract from the data? So it's a short 4 minute video. And yes, there is joy in statistics and you'll see that in due course.
Alison Lawson 6:55
Everybody loves statistics. I'm red, so I'm sure you are aware of that. But it's a really important video.
Amritpal Slaich 6:59
50% of us.
Alison Lawson 7:01
Yeah, exactly. So we will look at the video later in the session as well. So we'll get a lot out of that. So we do encourage you to have a look at those activities. OK, thank you. Let's move on.
Amritpal Slaich 7:06
OK.
Yeah.
Right. So there are a number of sessions sessions. I'm sorry, a number of sections to this session. The first part will be is about becoming a tech savvy business. Then we will look at risks, uncertainties and vulnerabilities. So that ties in with really the second pre session activity we sent you. Then we'll look at some digital tools and techniques and lastly, a digital audit of your organisation. So it basically takes you through.
A whole set of one to 1-2 and three, and then the last bit says, well, how can you apply? How can you reflect on some of the things that we've taught?
We discussed within your own organisation.
So the first section looks at becoming a tech savvy business. So the slide that will follow will show you the historical development.
Or industrial revolution?
Of industry. OK, so we talk about industry 1.0 industry 2.0 all the way up to what's now called 5.0.
Industry 1.0 we were talking about steam power.
Mechanisation. Industry two was mass production.
Industry three was automation. Industry four was cyber physics, physical systems, Internet of Things and five is more about artificial intelligence and pervasive connectivity of technology. OK, so.
It's it's. They're not distinct. They're kind of one blended into the other. You can't really get to industry 4.0 without the first three taking place. What you can see at the bottom is the timeline and what you notice hopefully will be the actually.
Alison Lawson 8:54
MMM.
Amritpal Slaich 8:57
The time gap between, say, industry 1.0 to 2.0 is roughly just over 100 years. Then it becomes slightly, exactly more or less 100 years, and then it starts to get shorter and shorter. So the pace of change is getting faster and faster. So all of these changes have had an impact on society.
And trade and, you know, connecting businesses not just to your local.
Community, but now with with through the Internet, we we, you know businesses can can connect throughout the world and trade is taking place globally so.
There are repercussions and there are advantages and there are things that you can leverage for your business to make it to help it grow. Allison, would you like to add anything?
Alison Lawson 9:42
Yeah, from my perspective, I see this very much as an evolution rather than a series of revolutions. And I think that you're right, Amrit. The the industry revolutions are becoming quicker and quicker. And so we'll see six point nought before we know it. And for those of us who've lived through several of these already, it becomes almost expected that the technology you have today will be out of date tomorrow.
The other thing that I really like about this consideration of these various stages of industrial evolution is that in each case the machinery that we use changes, adapts, it becomes more advanced, more sleek, more sophisticated.
Uses different kinds of power, but it's still human beings using it. There's still humans, and there's always going to be some people who will look at.
An oil lamp and say, oh, it's not as good as what we used to have a nice big candle and he'll look at the electricity light when it first came in. And so it's not as good as the oil lamp and and so on. So there's always going to be some kind of.
Parking back and there's always a worry for those people.
Whose jobs are going to disappear because the technology means that they don't need to do that particular task anymore. And when we have those concerns, either from employers or from students, the answer is that there will be new jobs, there'll be jobs that we don't know about yet. There'll be jobs that are part and parcel of that next stage of the evolution.
Because, you know, 30 years ago when when we were working in marketing, we didn't have jobs around social media management or search engine optimization and so on. But now they're two a penny because the technology's there and it needs somebody to manage it and use it. So right now, we don't have AI managers and and so on, but we will have, we will have those in our in our businesses in the future because it will be a tool that no industry can ignore.
And so there are some jobs that will come to us around the corner that we don't know yet and can't envisage yet. And they are because.
Technology evolves over time and and therefore that that's just something to try and sell off the the the concern that people may have around technology stealing their jobs, it creates new jobs as well. Thanks Emmett.
Amritpal Slaich 12:06
Absolutely. Yeah. That's me. That industry 1.0 is about mechanisation, steam power and weaving looms. So imagine wherever your business is, maybe you know there are things that could be mechanised within a business but the next stage 2.0 is mass production. So what could you do as a business to mass produce whatever service or product you have industry three you talked about talks about automation. So what elements of within your business could be automated?
How could you use computers? Industry 4.0 starts talking about how you can connect things.
How resources electronic resources can be shared. So rather than having a printer in every office, you have a printer may be shared across the whole floor, you know through local area networks and things like that. And then it's tried to connect through the Internet. So whereas before you were just selling your product or service locally or nationally, you're now being able to sell things to other parts of the world, you know to.
Middle East to the Far East, South America, et cetera. And then industry 5.0, what we're looking at here is about artificial intelligence and how that can be incorporated. I think cryptocurrency as well is in there. I believe I can't see because of. Yeah. So how can that be maybe incorporated within your business. So in a way you know we want to take you on this journey and see how your business can be better prepared.
Alison Lawson 13:24
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 13:36
For the rapidly changing industrial world that we have.
Alison Lawson 13:40
OK so.
Amritpal Slaich 13:45
So I look right in this kind of picture. What we've got is like, let's start with the top one, which is in orange changing business model, how you operate, how you do your business, how could that be changed. So new digital technologies would lead you to new ways of doing business. So it might be that you are faster at doing something, OK you can produce more.
You are quick more responsive to your to your customers. You are more efficient.
In in sharing information within your organisation and all of that in different ways can actually add new revenue, additional revenue while providing further value to customers and access to new opportunities and markets. So if we reflect on how businesses operate in the last 10 years, they've changed dramatically. But if you go back to the 1980s, how businesses were set up, but in terms of servicing their customers and internally.
Sharing information that's changed dramatically. OK, so all of that has allowed organisations to produce more, but also to do it quicker.
So that the new revenue leads to efficiency and productivity, improved efficiency, less multiple handling of data. So it's more shared resources and increased work accuracy leading to better resource utilisation of resources and a higher profitability. So we're trying to understand how.
Processes work within the organisation and to get them to be as efficient as efficient as possible. Real time data capture.
And reporting lead to better visibility of business performance. So it probably the 1980s, you might produce reports on a weekly or monthly basis to see what the performance is. But now with all this technology, especially with the with the Internet, literally every minute you can see how many orders have been placed and what the business is doing. And you can start seeing where the issues are developing within your organisation.
Alison, would you like to?
Alison Lawson 15:43
Yeah, that was just. I've seen that myself. I've seen that myself in, in business where? Back in the day, you'd have a monthly or quarterly sales report. And even then you wouldn't necessarily be able to trust the data completely because a lot of the sales were on sale or return. And if they're a 90 day return, then you you have to wait at least 1/4 to find out whether the sales you've made with had been returned to you. So that was a very.
Amritpal Slaich 15:44
So anything we'll.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 16:10
Risky way of judging how much you'd made.
But then as time went by, you could see reactions much more quickly. You could see real time sales, particularly with e-commerce. It's really quick and and you know, you've definitely made the sale. So a particular business business to consumer rather than business to business, yes, there still will be returns, but you can factor in the returns into your forecasting. OK, good move on.
Amritpal Slaich 16:38
Yep, Yep, Yep.
So this looks at the transformation. So what we'd like you to do is consider where you are along the route. So are you at a digitisation stage, digitalisation or digital transformation? So digitisation within your business would be about you instead of paper based. You've transformed transferred to using Excel, converting historical data.
Which may have been stored in in ledgers, in books, etcetera, into some sort of digital format.
The tables into some sort of SQL databases, access databases, etcetera. Then going from there, what talking about digitalisation is where you're looking at your business processes are they? Are they allowing for a smoother flow of information between the various functions from Excel you're going to systems and applications using digital technologies to convert your business processes, so you're now looking at how you're operating internally. So you're trying to start joining.
The various functions together.
In the sense of data flow, OK. And do you drive transformation is future evolution of business where we get a whole systems are being integrated, a business response to emerging technologies, technologies to it significantly improved performance. So you might have One Financial system at the heart of your business and out of that you could have some other systems, maybe a manufacturing resource planning software, something to do with logistics, something to do with your warehousing side which where the information and the data.
Going across the organisation to allow speedy information exchange or data exchange for better decision making.
Alison Lawson 18:23
Yeah, some of the challenges that I found in my research about this with publishers was that some of them weren't really wanted to go on this journey, but the cost of doing it was quite significant. And the longer you wait, the cheaper the technology gets. But the further behind the curve you are and the further away your competitors are. So it is a bit of a balance judging when you invest to get what you need so that you stay abreast of the.
Amritpal Slaich 18:40
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 18:50
The industry, and so your competitors don't get too far ahead of you and trying to it's very difficult sometimes to judge the return on investment for technology because it's a return isn't necessarily a monetary value. It will be a return in terms of efficiency of processes.
And time less time wasted or time that's been saved that can you can redeploy to do something else. So it is it is a challenge for businesses to go on this journey.
Amritpal Slaich 19:17
I guess it's quite scary for businesses as well. You know, they're they're busy doing whatever they're doing and suddenly they've got to find the space to do it. And there are so many technologies out there, it's hard to know. How do you choose or which one do you go with.
Alison Lawson 19:25
Yep.
It's a risk, yeah. And whether you go with the one that's off the shelf, which may or may not fit your organisation exactly, or whether you go bespoke and pay the extra, which may or may not, then integrate with other people's similar technology. So you can't necessarily integrate the suppliers or or customers then, but that's for another session and that's that's that's just an interesting thing. OK, let's talk about leadership off you go.
Amritpal Slaich 19:33
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But part of that transformation requires.
Organisations are fearful, but the you need to have leadership or buy in from a very senior level, so you need somebody who offers digital leadership, a person who is acts as a champion, inspiring teams with proofs of concepts.
Demonstrating quick wins on a small scale, then visionary communication of vision so you'll be able to transfer present a vision, communication, vision with preferred types of innovations, direction of future activities. But you also want to encourage employees as well because people get comfortable in doing things in certain ways and they would may not necessarily see what the purpose of the changes and what the benefits are.
Alison Lawson 20:25
Listen, please.
Amritpal Slaich 20:44
So employees will need support.
In this journey as well.
Alison Lawson 20:50
Absolutely. And I've got to say again from my own research, if it isn't supported from the very top, then people don't want to go along with it. That said, you do need involvement from the bottom up as well better the best ways that where this works is where people at the bottom really want the change to happen and the people at the top really support the change as well.
Amritpal Slaich 20:57
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with that because the people who are actually doing the work need to be able to need to be comfortable with whatever system is acquired, developed or purchased. But you need that buy in from the very senior level for it to actually happen. But they need to let, yeah.
Alison Lawson 21:25
Yeah, absolutely.
And especially you need buying from senior level if they need to sign off the money to spend it on the tech.
Amritpal Slaich 21:32
Yeah.
Yeah, but then, yeah, it's by. It's that unbalanced against who's actually going to be using the tech, et cetera. So so where are we now in terms of technology trends and underlying technologies? So in the screen in front of you, you can see something like 7 up to 10 different kinds of technologies, which are prevalent now to varying degrees depending. And again, it depends from industry to industry and also from country to country, so.
Alison Lawson 21:34
Yeah.
Yeah, mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 22:02
If we go through some of the next level process automation.
Industrial Internet of Things robotics. So there's more, you know, manufacturing, engineering using a lot of robotics, even in warehousing. Robotics is used as well.
Process visualisation. So you've got 3D and 4D printing which has been around for a number of years.
Alison Lawson 22:22
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 22:23
Tele telephony or mobile phones 5G connect connectivity is quite prevalent in.
It's like sometimes it's that of things. IoT talks about connecting more and more devices within your business or within the domestic setting to the Internet. So it could be connecting your your fridge freezer, it could be connecting or not cord but it is connecting your TV's. It could be or is connecting the light settings. The heaters within your house so that you can kind of activate things as you're going along wherever you are.
Alison Lawson 22:51
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 23:01
Distributed infrastructure so cloud and edge computing.
So things like accessing to OneDrive, which many of you may may be using already. OK, then we've got next generation computing such as quantum computing. Now that is kind of more as a as a government or very high institutional level. Countries like America, Japan, China are into quantum computing. Then we've got applied AI which.
I we will. They will mention it now kind of thing and basically it's looking at you know computer vision.
The natural language processing and speech technology, so you know it's it's those chat bots that you're communicating with when you need help on some websites.
It's it's some of the functionality within your phones, so it is kind of permeating, but it's coming more and more prevalent and the speed at which it's both at a commercial and an individual personal level that we're being exposed to, AR is growing rapidly.
Future of programming trust architecture.
Which is there, and then we've got some things on the right hand side, which is very, very specialised bio revolution next generation materials and future of clean technologies.
All the way from nuclear fusion, which you know it'll be government, very large organisations doing that and battery, battery storage etcetera. So there's a whole host of technologies which are being used to varying degrees across different industries, but they are getting more and more prevalent.
Alison Lawson 24:38
Darren and I think also we got to be aware that different generations grow up with different technologies. And so if today's customers aren't used to some of these technologies, tomorrow's customers will be and so they will have different expectations and it's always staying on top of those expectations and keeping your part of your finger on the pulse of what your industry is doing and what your competitors are doing. Something else that we've talked about in some of these sessions is.
Amritpal Slaich 24:43
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 25:03
The fact that there's always technological development going on that we don't necessarily read about.
And we won't necessarily know about because it will be part of, for example, the NASA space programme where they will be developing new materials and so on, or there might be might be in a research lab somewhere that's developing some new application of a technological tool that won't actually see the light of day until it's affordable for businesses or for individuals. And so there will be tech out there now that we don't know about yet because it isn't affordable for businesses yet.
Amritpal Slaich 25:25
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 25:37
And so that the robots that we see at the moment.
In our business settings tend to be autonomous vehicles and we see a lot of them in use in factories, on production lines, in warehouses, even in restaurants. I've seen that robotic weighted almost like a an electronic weight trolley really rather than a proper robot, although it's sort of got a :). So it looks like a little robot and entertains you in the restaurant. But.
It will become more popular and more prevalent, and it's just being aware that these underlying technologies are going to be ever more important and it will increase in number.
Over time.
Amritpal Slaich 26:17
Yeah, absolutely.
Alison Lawson 26:17
OK.
Oh, I'll be quicker.
Amritpal Slaich 26:21
So now this action we're looking at risks.
Uncertainties and vulnerabilities. So basically saying, look, you know as you make the digital transformation, what's the impact to your business that you need, you do need to be aware of. So on the next slide, it's got kind of four categories. There's certain things you have to do with your data. So there's certain things as a business you've got to do compliance with. So there's the HMRC with regard to tax.
And revenue etcetera, so that you have a responsibility to collate.
Store that data for a period of time. You know, whatever the government requires in terms of taxation, then you want other data, which is GDPR.
General data protection, which basically says there's a certain as you.
Store capture and store data. Then it must be stored for a certain for the purpose that it was collected. That's the purpose. It can only be used for.
What you do with that data, who has has access to to that data, how long it's stored, if there's inaccurate elements to it, how can people change it? Change that so you've got to be compliant with the GDPR legislation as well.
Alison Lawson 27:23
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 27:31
But you know, Once Upon a time, companies didn't have such a huge digital footprint. They didn't have mobile phones, they didn't have laptops.
Wi-Fi networks and all this kind of stuff. So you've got to have security with regard to your digital footprint.
How you store data you've got to protect yourself as an organisation from viruses, malware and even the equipment that your staff use. You've got to protect that as well, whether it's a laptop PC.
Mobile phone or any other electronic device that you you give to your employees or they may take away from the from the office as part of their work. OK. Then there's also what happens in an emergency. If something were to go wrong with your premises or some kind of maybe there's some sort of cyber attack, what's your continued business continuity plan? So what's the emergency plan if something were to go wrong with your premises, how do you continue?
Running your business, what's the how do you minimise the duration that your business?
Working in those exceptional circumstances and obviously there's the future development, you might have plans about your the new products that you're developing, the new engineering machinery that you're developing, some new clothing design, etcetera. And then eventually there might be some date information about exit strategy. But I know Allison, you've got something to say about business continuity about.
Alison Lawson 28:56
Yeah, absolutely.
First of all, it's really important because we have so much data now we gather so much data, we give away our data on a daily basis and we as organisations store a lot of information and we have minds of of of gold mines, of data. It's just how do we use it appropriately and how do we make the best use of it and how do we make sure we've stored it safely and securely and appropriately in terms of business continuity.
Amritpal Slaich 29:02
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 29:25
It will be absolutely.
It'll be your own context that determines what your business continuity issues may be.
For example, when I worked in an organisation very close to Heathrow airport, some of our business continuity plans were around. What happened if there was a major incident at the airport? It wasn't. We weren't working at the airport, but we knew that if there were a major incident at the airport, then all the local roads would be gridlocked. There may be problems with power supplies.
There could be all sorts of knock on effects, but one of the big issues that you really need to be careful about in terms of business continuity is what is what do you do if the Wi-Fi goes down.
What do you do if the electricity goes down, which is worse than the Wi-Fi going down? And I can give you a personal example of this. And it was from a music festival that I was at a couple of years ago and in the beer tent, which come on, it's one of the most important parts of the music festival. They had a whole load of tills that were using Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi went down as they couldn't sell any beer, which.
Amritpal Slaich 30:30
I know.
Alison Lawson 30:30
It was a disaster, as you can imagine, and it turned out that one of the tills could actually take cash.
And so they were saved. But it was they didn't want to do the rest of the people with their tills, with milling abouts. And what do we do? What do we do? It didn't occur to them to just take cash on all the tills and write it down old style and take money and and deal with it that way. But the problem is a lot of people haven't got cash with them either these days because they rely on that electronic payment.
Amritpal Slaich 30:58
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 31:01
And so it's having those contingency plans for the for the what if scenario it's thinking about what's the worst thing that could possibly happen and how do I plan for it? And hopefully you will never need that plan. But you do need to think about how your business continues. Should something really disruptive happen?
We didn't have a pandemic in our business continuity plans until 2019, 2922 and 20 to be. Now. We've all probably got that, if not a pandemic, but certainly what happens in the case of an outbreak of some serious illness and what do we do with 50% of our staff are either off sick or affected in some other way? How do we continue?
So I think that business continuity plans in terms of personnel, in terms of technology, in terms of power are really, really important, OK.
Amritpal Slaich 31:47
Yeah. I mean, we'll basically we've basically presented 4 different broad categories of digital data within your organisation to the next slide.
Alison Lawson 31:55
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 31:58
So.
Basically what we're saying here is that there are risks organisational risks. So from a system and it perspective, the average if there's a break in continuity, it can cost a business approximately £20,000 per hour. Minimum obviously depends on the size of your business, but it's an average, OK and then in terms of business continuity 61% that's three and roughly three and five of organisations across the globe, so it's not even just across in just in the UK, it's across the globe.
Alison Lawson 32:30
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 32:30
Don't have a business continuity plan, so the question is.
For myself to ask of yourselves, do you have a business continuity plan? 45% of organisations just under half, that's nine and 20. However, you want to look at it, suffer a data breach due to successfully being hacked. That's quite high. It feels quite high to me.
And then storage 45% of data breaches are cloud based. So I know earlier on we said look there are things like OneDrive and you know you can store things on the on on the cloud.
But you've got to make sure it's secure and in the old days, when things weren't connected via the Internet, we didn't have Wi-Fi, it would have been a padlock. So you kind of need to create your virtual padlocks for all your data. It's very important.
Alison Lawson 33:05
Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 33:18
So cybersecurity breaches survey 2024. So I'm just going to kind of read it out to you. Cybersecurity breaches and attacks remain a common threat. Yeah. And we're now in 2025, and it will continue to be like that. Half of businesses, around 1/3 of charities, 50% thirty, 2% report or having experienced some form of cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months. This is much higher for medium businesses at 70%.
Large business business is 74% which is 3/4.
And high income charities with half a million or more in annual income, 66%, which is 2/3 by far the most common type of breeds or attack, is fishing, which we'll look at in in the next few slides. 84% of businesses and 83% of charities followed to a lesser extent by others impersonating organisations and emails are online. So 35% of businesses, 37% of charities. Again, it seems a similar number.
Percentage and then viruses or malware businesses at 17% and 14% for charities.
Now all of this this quote is from a government website cybersecurity breaches Survey 2024. So we've put there's at the bottom of the actual slide is the is the is the kind of the this citation or the source from where this quote is coming from.
Alison Lawson 34:38
So yeah, part of this is to show you that it's quite common. So if you've been attacked, you're not alone, but also to to as a warning that you need to be prepared to guard against these attacks, because whilst hackers do target the bigger businesses, they're not averse to targeting smaller businesses and charities.
Amritpal Slaich 34:44
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So you may have come across some of these tax, such as malware, phishing and e-mail spoofing. So malware is malicious software designed to harm computers and computer systems, viruses, spyware, ransomware, Trojans, worms, rootkits. Fishing is tricking you into revealing sensitive data or downloading malware, often leading to identity theft, credit fraud or another cyber crime. An e-mail spoofing is a message appearing to be from a legitimate sender.
Which is a common trick in fishing and spam emails. What we're advising is, you know, what kind of protections can you put in place as an organisation? How can you train your staff to be aware of things like fishing e-mail, spoofing malware, you know, be be cognizant and kind of become aware of what what is the attached document to an e-mail that you receive? Is it a correct e-mail address?
Alison Lawson 35:55
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 35:57
Things like that. So it's there's internal training and internal safety measures that you can do take to make your business more safe and secure.
And all businesses do that wherever.
Alison Lawson 36:08
Yeah, we've got some good links at the end of the session too. Some tips about that.
Amritpal Slaich 36:11
Yeah.
So here we've got another diagram. It's a. It's again, it's from the cyber risk. It's from the government website. It's cyber risk management.
Reducing the impact so 81% of large companies report in breach, that's four in five, four out of every five.
And it's costing them one average 600,000 to 1.15 million. OK, So what can you do? You can do that. You can survey either use the IE user education. You can do what can you do in the delivery sense.
Network primitive defences, malware protection, password policy are you refreshing your passwords? Are they strong passwords? Are they weak passwords? Is it the same password? What's the configuration setting for your Wi-Fi network, et cetera? OK, then breaches. If if a breach were to take place, well, what can you do? Patch management, secure configuration? User access?
If you get access to a system, does somebody have access to everything, or is it some court, some sort of?
Layers of access that you give device controls, malware protection and then if you will get affected well, what are the steps you can do to control?
And kind of mitigate any impact that they might be on your business, what you need to also look at is who might be attacking you. So on the top right, you can see that there might be cyber criminals interested in making money through fraud or from the sale or valuable information, industrial competitors and that could be from anywhere in the world or nearby even to be honest and foreign intelligence services.
Alison Lawson 37:48
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 37:52
Hackers, activists and employees disgruntled employees are also possible, so the people do it for different motives.
Alison Lawson 37:57
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 38:01
But you know, there's some listed there for you, Allison. Anything you would like to.
Alison Lawson 38:05
Surprises me that hackers bother. I don't really see the the motivation, but then that's because I'm not a hacker. I think quite a lot of hackers, particularly the professionals and some of the hacktivists, see it as a challenge to where no good, especially the law. Large organisations, especially the large tech organisations, when they are shouting about how super there is.
There firewall is and how good they are at resisting these hacks. It then becomes a real challenge to all the hackers to say, well, I'll see how long it will take me to get through that then and.
They're not doing it particularly for gain, except to drag that organisation reputation through the muds and to prove to everybody that their data isn't as safe as they think it is. They're not necessarily getting paid to do it, but there are, as you said, it's there's some other organisations that will pay people to go in and hack and it's it's a whole whole industry, yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 39:03
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 39:04
OK.
Amritpal Slaich 39:06
All right, so.
We mentioned right at the beginning there was some, there was some information about some fines and GDPR fines. So this is from the ICO Information Commissioner's Office, their website. So some of the biggest fines for GDPR in 2024 were to, you know, fairly large, well known companies, substantial fines, meta GDPR, a fine of €1.2 billion Amazon.
Meta, Meta, TikTok but there's a whole host of companies that have been mentioned there because we just didn't have the space.
Nothing special about Ireland. It's just that's where some of these big companies have located.
Alison Lawson 39:47
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 39:48
But it's the scale of the fines and then you have to look at how many people are using some of these the services. Some of these companies, Meta, Amazon, etcetera. So what they're saying is cumulatively GDP defines now close to €5 billion, which is quite a lot.
Alison Lawson 39:56
Mm hmm.
Yeah. And I think that you might not have had that kind of level of fine if your organisation has a data breach because you won't necessarily have the same number of records that are available. You may remember a few years ago when talk talk had that data breach here in the UK and it was basically everybody's records were available online, even if it were for a short time, it's damaging.
Amritpal Slaich 40:11
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 40:30
Because not only can your your your customers details be seen by other people, but your reputation is damaged.
Which sometimes irreparably so. You have to be very careful. It's reputational damage as well as damage to your business. And sometimes if you have a very small breach, the Information Commissioner's Office would regard it not as a fining offence, but you do have at least the responsibility to report that to the ICO. And there's some really useful information on the Information Commissioner's Office website, the information there on the screen.
A really useful document about what small businesses need to know and what they can do to protect their data to guard against breaches and to to guard against that kind of reputational risk.
Amritpal Slaich 41:14
Definitely.
So what can you do to keep your IT system safe? So this is from the Information Commissioner's Office. Back up your data, you know, so use strong passwords and multi factor authentication. And I think multi factor authentication seems to be growing now more and more even back you know banks are doing organisations, businesses are doing it strong passwords.
Alison Lawson 41:18
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 41:41
Go beyond just calling it, you know, password 123 and those kind of passwords there are, you know, your your laptop may even suggest a strong password for you 16 characters or whatever.
Be aware of your surroundings so you know you're in a team's meeting and in the back there might be some clues as to what your password is, so just be careful of that.
Be be very wary of suspicious emails. Check the e-mail address to is it is it close or is it exactly what you expect it to be? Install antivirus and malware protection. Make make sure you get updates on on both of those. Protect your device when it's unattended. Make sure your Wi-Fi connection is secure so they're different. Kind of standards of encryption that you can use on Wi-Fi. Make sure that you're the one you're using is the most up to date.
Limit access to those who need it so you don't have everything open to everybody here, only for the purpose of doing somebody's job should they have access to certain files. Take care when sharing your screen and don't keep data for longer than you need it. So there's kind of, you know, that you when you get data, it's this. You have it for a purpose. Once that purpose is fulfilled.
Alison Lawson 42:38
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 42:50
You shouldn't really use the data beyond that. OK? Dispose of our old IT equipment. How do you do that? You can't just put it in the skip. You know, somebody might then start trying to access what's on your hard drive and record and record securely. So again, it might be.
Financial data that you you've you've captured sales data, any other financial data about your employees, et cetera. So you've got to kind of dispose of old it equipment in a very secure manner. So just be Cognizant and aware of that.
Alison Lawson 43:20
Yeah, I think we all learned that first one about backing up your data in exactly the same way and that is by not backing it up and losing our data because we all know we should back things up and we all have that that time that one dime where we haven't backed up and we've closed down the computer without saving or we've put it on a pen drive, we've lost the pen drive and there's be we read about people who leave their laptops on trains and that's the only place where they have their data and so on. These things do happen and we see it a lot with students actually at.
Amritpal Slaich 43:28
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 43:50
That they store the assignment they're working on, their or their research on a laptop, and then the laptop has some kind of fatal error. And because they haven't stored it in the cloud or any other format, they then lose the data. So backing up is really important and and don't be the one who loses your data also. But although we're very irritated by multi factor authentication, it's always one of those things that makes us think.
What a waste of my time. It's really important because it does make the more secure.
Amritpal Slaich 44:16
Yeah.
It's his.
Alison Lawson 44:20
And something else I wanted to mention about the being aware of your surroundings and the connections that you're using. It's so tempting now to sit in a cafe that's got Wi-Fi and just catch up on your emails or to use the train or the bus Wi-Fi to just have a quick look at that document you were looking at earlier. And sometimes if you can get a Wi-Fi connection that's good enough and fast enough to actually do that work, which sometimes is difficult on a train and so on. But if you do.
Then your access might not be secure.
And so that's why a lot of companies use VPNs, so you can access materially via a secure means rather than by a hotel or cafes own Wi-Fi, which may not be as a signal at the same levels of security in it. The other thing I was going to mention about being around your surroundings and who you're sharing your screen with, there was this social media craze in the last year or so-called be real, which.
A lot of youngsters signed up to.
And the idea was that at any point during the day, your phone would give you this notification that now is the time to take your real photo and you have to take a photo of yourself being real as you are right then and now because a lot of youngsters would post photographs of themselves online, but they weren't genuine, spontaneous photos. They would be very carefully curated photographs that they'd spent some time putting themselves together to look good. So this idea was that you're just being yourself. You're being real. And so.
Quite a lot of youngsters was taking photos of themselves at the work with their computer in the background showing confidential documents.
And that means that somebody can get hold of that data, can zoom into your screen and see stuff that is potentially not something you should be sharing. So you just to be careful about that and be careful about if you are using your computer in a cafe and so on. Who else can see the screen that you're working on? That's just what I wanted to say on that one. Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 46:18
So yeah, no, absolutely.
So what have we got here? Small business. This is on the UK National Cybersecurity Centre. So on the left, small business guide, cybersecurity. It's telling you some of the things you already mentioned about backing up your data, protecting your organisation from from malware, keeping smartphones and tablets safe, using passwords to protect your data and avoid phishing attacks. And then you've got some actually live hyperlinks.
Which are useful for your organisation in terms of checking your cybersecurity and cybersecurity action plan. Both of these are free resources that you can access.
Alison Lawson 46:58
Yeah, it's really useful to go through those. We do recommend that you have a look at those. Either pause the video now and have a look at those documents and save those ur LS for your colleagues or come back to this slide at the end and click on those links because they're really really useful to you in your organisations.
And so on to the final section. Sorry, carry on it.
Amritpal Slaich 47:19
So this section is about, yeah.
This is digital tools and techniques. Got another section as well, but yeah, digital tools and techniques so.
Alison Lawson 47:28
Yes.
Amritpal Slaich 47:32
Basically, what we're really trying to show from this particular slide is basically, and this is from 2017. So you know what number of years forward from there, but even in that time within 60 seconds for instance, on YouTube, more than 400 hours of video were being uploaded.
On Google, 3.8 million searches were taking place on LinkedIn. 120 new accounts were being created etcetera, etcetera. Netflix 87,000 hours of video were being watched. I suspect the Netflix one has gone up quite dramatically post, you know, various lockdowns, etcetera. But basically I mean this is 60 seconds. So it's one minute right on Skype 2,000,000 minutes of calls were being done every 60 seconds.
So.
And there's different. There's different platforms, different platforms.
But the volume of data, the type of data that's being shared is quite extensive, and the speed at which it's being captured is also growing all the time.
It's changed from from Yester year where it was more kind of tabulated. It's now more non form unformatted data, so you've got videos, you've got blogs.
You've got sound recordings, et cetera, so you know.
It's changed in terms of the kind of data that's being captured.
Structured and unstructured data is probably the right term, and there's more unstructured data being captured than ever before, but it's growing.
Alison Lawson 49:04
I think what fascinates what fascinates me about this is you can look at this and yes, it was a few years ago now, but it was so massive, even then and.
Amritpal Slaich 49:13
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 49:15
It all of this will be orders of magnitude bigger now and some of these some of these platforms have new names or may have been replaced or merged and and some of them have grown massively, some may be smaller but that they are all an indication of the sheer amount of digital.
Amritpal Slaich 49:24
Yes, yes.
Alison Lawson 49:34
So work that can take goes around the world every minute, and I kind of imagine planet Earth to be surrounded by this literal cloud of data. You know, I can imagine aliens from another planet coming towards us and saying we can't get through to the planet Earth because it's so surrounded with photos of cats and photos of of people's dinners. And, you know, and.
Amritpal Slaich 49:52
OK. No, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 50:00
Photos of people at this you know, out on their holidays and so on and all these.
Massive.
Different kinds of data are there there and and we we add to it on a daily basis.
We're continuously adding to it, but we don't ever tend to delete it and so it's still there and it grows with a massive it grows and grows and grows. And some people have difficulty understanding well, where does it go when you when you post something to intercept, where is it, where actually literally is it and it's stored on our server somewhere. And so for every piece of data that's out there, we have more and more need for.
Amritpal Slaich 50:27
Yeah.
Oh really?
Alison Lawson 50:47
Or that data anymore. And there was such an outcry from families and friends of those who died saying no, because that's how I'm still keeping them alive for me. I'm still in touch with them and I could resonate with that because I still sometimes look at my cousin's accounts on Facebook and I still send her happy birthday messages on her birthday. And because I can try and remember her that way. And so they had to relent and allow people to keep their their dead people's accounts. And so.
Amritpal Slaich 50:48
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 51:17
How do you decide when data should die, when data should stop being stored as that's an issue for organisations as well to think about.
Gdpr says I don't need personal data for this amount of time. I can stop having it after I've I've used it instead of necessary, but there'll be other data that is not GDPR compliant. There's things to do with GDPR that you will store in your business and you have to think about how long do I need that data. Do I need to keep storing it because you will be paying for that storage?
I need to think about how much you need to store them for how long you need to store it.
Amritpal Slaich 51:52
The the other thing about this data is that at an individual personal level, we're probably people are using all of these things, but businesses also have representation. Use this, so through whether it's through YouTube.
Alison Lawson 51:52
OK.
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 52:06
Businesses will use LinkedIn, businesses will tweet or X, as it's now called. Businesses will use Skype, but we may also do it as an individual level, so it's not just individuals, it's businesses that are accessing many of these technologies.
Alison Lawson 52:08
Mm hmm mm hmm mm.
Yeah.
Need.
Amritpal Slaich 52:25
It's huge. What's the point and it's growing.
So data.
Alison Lawson 52:29
Yep, Yep.
Amritpal Slaich 52:32
Volume. So the previous slide basically says there's the volume of data that we are sharing. Some of it we are aware of even since this morning, you may have used your mobile phones to search for the weather. Location services may have come on, you may have received some WhatsApp messages checked Facebook, you may have done something on Tiktok. You may have looked or booked a holiday.
You've purchased something from some retailers.
Clothing item or some? I don't know. Some musical item that you were looking for. You may have placed a food order so the volume is there from all of us. The velocities to do with the speed and that's growing, you know how many times since this morning have you been on your phone or your laptop?
Doing whatever OK, the variety of data. So what would what do we mean by the variety is because we had structured and unstructured. So in the majority of data now is is unstructured. So there's pictures.
There's videos, there's sound recordings, there's blogs, there's comments that we leave and all that kind of stuff. So the variety is changing. So how do we analyse that? All of this data carries a value, OK, for businesses, because with how you interact the business can understand something about you as a customer. OK, well, then there's the validity, how accurate, how robust is the data that you're holding the variability.
You might want to visualise the data through some sort of dashboard through something like Tableau or Power BI.
And the veracity of the data as well. There's loads of fees there probably the first four or five of the most important, but you know that it's basically saying there are different ways of understanding the importance and value of the data within your organisation and all of it leads to well, we can make better decisions and if we make better decisions, it's better for us as a business.
So more data. So before we would have taken a sample from the sample, we would have some sort of statistical test et cetera. But we have all of the data now. So we get more as we get more data, we get more accurate analysis leading to better decisions with those better decisions, improve business, reduce risk cost reduction and efficiencies which generates value from generating value from bigger data sets.
Which cannot be analysed by traditional techniques. Now you've got to remember there are some huge companies out there, you know you like. Some of your amazons, et cetera.
Who Visa, MasterCard, etcetera. Some of these huge businesses have got volumes and volumes of data. What do they do with it? You as an SME will have will still have some data. How can you best leverage leverage what information that's contained? What knowledge is contained within that data in order for your business to really thrive? So all of that goes on, the next click there will be an arrow that goes from left to right which says.
Alison Lawson 55:23
Absolutely.
Amritpal Slaich 55:29
Data monetization.
Alison Lawson 55:30
Absolutely yeah. Because it's how do you store your data so that you can mine it effectively so you can interrogate it effectively and analyse the what the story that it's telling you. So if you do get a lot of customer returns, you need to be able to look at the reasons for the returns and work out what's the main reason and what's the big problem here? What do I need to address?
Amritpal Slaich 55:35
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 55:52
Or if there's a problem with delays, what's causing the problem? What? How do I address it? You need to be able to find that data in the morass of data that you have in order to make your business more efficient.
Take yourself money.
Amritpal Slaich 56:06
Exactly. So it's it's mining the data to get the Nuggets of information out. Now this is a really excellent short video by Hans Ross link.
It basically gives you 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes. The joys of statistics. Why do we play the video and then basically the learnings from it really about well how data can be visualised and what we can kind of how do we interpret what we see. So we play the video.
Alison Lawson 56:32
Yeah, OK. Fingers crossed.
Amritpal Slaich 56:34
Over to you, Alison.
Hear the volume.
So listen volume.
Alison Lawson 56:56
Right. Can you not hear it?
Amritpal Slaich 56:58
No, I can't hear her.
Alison Lawson 57:00
In that case, I'll come out and try it through the.
To this my.
Amritpal Slaich 57:09
Yeah, alright, just just do it in there.
Alison Lawson 57:10
Work.
Working.
Amritpal Slaich 57:14
No, no, I can't hear it.
Alison Lawson 57:17
K1 moment.
The settings.
Amritpal Slaich 57:39
And the voice not playing.
Alison Lawson 57:44
Not working.
Amritpal Slaich 57:45
I can't hear anything on my side, no.
Alison Lawson 57:48
OK. Oh, the joys of technology.
Amritpal Slaich 57:53
If only we were digitally transformed.
Alison Lawson 57:57
Try this way.
Amritpal Slaich 57:58
We are.
Alison Lawson 58:04
Let's try that one.
That working.
Amritpal Slaich 58:12
No, I can't hear anything.
Alison Lawson 58:16
OK, it looks like it it won't work because we are recording in teams. I think that's part of the issue. So I think we'll have to ask when you stop the pause the presentation and watch the video and what you'll find from that video is that Hans Rosling gives you an A visualisation of.
Amritpal Slaich 58:17
We just.
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 58:39
Data as it transforms over a period of time, and Emmett will talk you through the the learning from that video.
Amritpal Slaich 58:47
Yeah. So basically what he's got is he starts off with a kind of.
A scatter plot, right? And he talks about income for very all the countries, 200 odd countries and life expectancy. And he starts it. He covers it over 200 year period. So all the way up from the 18th century going forward. OK, So what we can see visually is how income and life expectancy for all these countries changes over time. So at the start.
Most of the most of the data points are in the bottom left quadrant, IE low income and low life expectancy. Each country is represented by a circle. The size of the circle represents the population, so you've got now three dynamics, so you've got income, life expectancy and also the size of the country. He's also colour coded them as well. I think they might be to do with associated with.
The continent? Possibly. But then you also have, because he's done it over time, you've got the additional.
Dimension of time being displayed and you can see the movement of how countries get more income and what's happening to their life expectancy. So at the start you've got countries like the UK and the Netherlands who start off very well. So with all datasets.
Whether if you if you're looking at time series data, you want to say, well, what could what do we know about what happened at certain time. So in the case of UK and the Netherlands at that time, what did they have that meant that they were had a greater life expectancy.
Relative to other countries and a higher income, they had their empires at that time. Then what Hans Rosling does is move things forward and you can see how things change. So when there was, for instance, World War One, I think it was happened or the Great Depression, there's a sudden drop globally of life expectancy at income. But after that country start growing, moving forward and you can see certain countries.
Alison Lawson 1:00:38
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 1:00:50
Rocketing in the last 20 years, countries like China, for instance, and other countries and India progressing forward and Japan. So you but the whole thing is what the positive that comes out of this. As you can see that all countries are moving from the lower quadrant and they are spreading out, but they're moving towards the upper top right quadrant. So there's a higher income and a greater life expectancy. But even within the country and then he he refers to China.
It refers to Shanghai.
Has got much higher income and life expectancy compared, you know, compares, I don't know which countries, Italy or somewhere.
Alison Lawson 1:01:28
It's compared to he showed us even within big countries, rural areas would fare differently from from the cities and so on.
Amritpal Slaich 1:01:32
Yeah.
I think he talks about the poorer areas within China and that has that's compared to some country in, in some developing nation et cetera. So basically there's a lot to learn and but the clever thing is how it's visualised and that gives you a lot of talking points and and you could do the similar thing for your business data, right, visualise it and then understand it through that. That's what the point of this video is.
Alison Lawson 1:01:37
Yeah.
Yeah.
That, yeah, the the important thing is from this that to put this video together, he would have had millions of different pieces of data and to try and give you that in spreadsheets or charts or tables would take forever. But to visualise it in this way saves time and that is the learning really that when you have data that is massive, it's sometimes more digestible for you, for your colleagues, for your clients. If you can visualise it. So rather than giving.
Amritpal Slaich 1:02:13
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 1:02:29
And tables of data. If you can show it in a graph or a chart, or if you can present it as a poster, then that would be sometimes easier to understand, easier for people to digest. And it's just a really good example of visualising data to make it more digestible.
Amritpal Slaich 1:02:45
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 1:02:46
OK.
Amritpal Slaich 1:02:47
Right. So.
Alison Lawson 1:02:48
Hi.
Amritpal Slaich 1:02:50
So all businesses capture data, even yours, as an SME does. So what can you do with it in terms of how do you analyse it so you've got descriptive analytics, predictive and prescriptive. So on the descriptive side, you could apply a statistical approach to analysing your data. So when what and when did it happen, how much is impacted, how often does it happen and what is the problem in terms of predictive analytics? There are a whole host of different techniques.
Of data, data mining, predictive modelling, machine learning, forecasting and simulation.
Basically saying what is likely to happen next? What if these trends continue? What if analysis and prescriptive is basically saying look, there are a whole host of possible valid solutions about what may happen or what we want to do? Which was the best one. So how do you explore your data to find the best solution that's right for your business. So all of these techniques, they're all the kind of ****, same data could be analysed in different.
Alison Lawson 1:03:43
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 1:03:52
Ways and they will give you a different understanding, but they will come under the banner of kind of information management.
Alison Lawson 1:03:57
Yeah. And it's really very common I think for organisations, particularly around financial forecasting, sales forecasting, to think about what the protected income might be over the next quarter or a half year or a year. Because if you can estimate your income then you know how much you might be able to invest and how much you might be able to purchase plant or machinery or what products that need to be stored. And so it's really important to do, but it's always important to do more than one projection to do the projection according.
Trend as you know it now and then the projection if actually the trend doesn't continue and it and it's isn't as good as it as Rosie as the current trend currently looks and that the sort of production where it goes really fantastically well and suddenly things are selling really well because you need to have a number of different options available to you. So you can make the appropriate decisions and always depending on whether you're a risk taker or whether you're risk averse.
Amritpal Slaich 1:04:38
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 1:04:55
You'll need those different scenarios so that you can make the appropriate decisions for your business.
Amritpal Slaich 1:05:01
And even in forecasting in that you're a retailer getting ready for Christmas or you're selling clothes where you need to work out which forecasts, how many of which, I don't know, food item or gift bag or clothing to purchase, you've got to forecast the amount. You don't want to under order and you'd you know you have lots of customers you don't want to over order because you have stock that's that's not sold.
Alison Lawson 1:05:24
Yeah, this is precisely where print on demand became really useful to publishers, because they could forecast demand and say over the next six months going on our previous sales figures, we're going to need 500 copies of this title and therefore, we will now print 500 copies and we will only have to store them for a maximum of six months, whereas before you might have printed 20,000 copies and they would sit in a warehouse waiting to be sold. So it's really, really useful.
Amritpal Slaich 1:05:36
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So basically it's saying look, there's a whole host of techniques of businesses and organisation can use to analyse the data and we at Derby University Derby Business School have developed new MSC in Business analytics and this kind of slide gives you a feel for some of the some of the modules and some of the applications and software that will be used as part of the part of the module. So you know got operations, analytics and saap systems analysis with business simulation where we.
Going to use simulate.
Statistical analysis and visualisation X excellent Tableau business, data management, SQL and Tableau. Google Analytics for web analytics. So there was a time before before the Internet companies didn't have websites, but now if you've got a website and which all companies do have, you know how many users do you get, how many unique users who, what time of the day are they visiting? Which which pages do they enter from? How long do they stay? What do they put in their shopping basket? What's the average order value, etcetera, etcetera.
Alison Lawson 1:06:30
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 1:06:50
So that's what marketing metrics and metrics will be about. And then obviously that we need to incorporate AI module on artificial intelligence. That is the growth area of interest and there's strategic and financial performance management which basically looks at financial data and how you can understand that for your organisation.
Alison Lawson 1:07:09
Yes, this is just really to show that technology is in every possible area of business and there's a technological tool that can be used in pretty much everything that we do today.
Amritpal Slaich 1:07:22
Yeah.
Alison Lawson 1:07:22
In business.
Hey.
Amritpal Slaich 1:07:27
So we can offer consultancy to yourselves, knowledge transfer partnerships. I think there's a marketing equivalent of that as well. Aren't there ktms or something?
Alison Lawson 1:07:35
Yeah. Yeah. Management one, yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 1:07:37
Yeah, management one training and obviously we've got the new MSE business analytics as well. So please make contact with the University of this if we can maybe offer some some sort of support along those lines. We'd be more than willing to have a conversation.
Alison Lawson 1:07:54
Guaranteed. If you have any queries about anything we've been talking about today, or if you'd just like to discuss your own experiences, we're always happy to to listen to businesses or if you're if you have a really interesting story to tell about your own digital journey or your organisation digital journey, it may be that you'd might like to come in and talk to our students and and perhaps share that experience with them because they learn very much from practitioners and professionals.
Amritpal Slaich 1:07:59
Good.
Alison Lawson 1:08:19
But yes, do get in touch if we can help you in any way.
Amritpal Slaich 1:08:22
When our students are also looking for kind of graduate dissertation projects as well, so there might be something there.
Alison Lawson 1:08:28
Yeah.
Amritpal Slaich 1:08:30
The final section is to say, you know, basically based on everything that we've discussed so far, OK, what about a digital audit of your organisation? So there was some post session activities which were on the slides that follow.
So we would like you to consider a digital audit of your organisation and in that digital audit, what would it look like? So we've got a series of activity series of questions.
Which would like you to consider. So if I just kind of slowly read them out. So which digital tools, applications and techniques does your organisation use as a first one? Which protections are presently in place? So it's kind of protection from via, you know, in terms of viruses, software, malware, all that kind of stuff. How could protections be improved, some directing you towards the government websites about cybersecurity?
And and those free audits, which digital tools and techniques might be useful for the future. So as you digital transform, you might want to look at your how you analyse your data, how you store it, how you share it, how much digital transformation impact your staff. Would there also be impact to your customers and to suppliers and what would the road map look like prepared? Varying your organisation? Excuse me for a digital future.
Alison Lawson 1:09:41
Mm hmm.
Amritpal Slaich 1:09:49
So there's there's quite a lot for you to reflect on, Allison, would you like to?
Alison Lawson 1:09:54
Now, I'd say that don't do this alone. Unless, of course you you are your whole business. If it is just you. But even if it is just you, it might be worth finding somebody. That buddy should talk about these issues because you won't. You won't necessarily know all the answers. You probably need to discuss with colleagues and to find out about what other happens in other parts of your business or in other roles in your business. And it might be useful to talk to people about what they use. Perhaps use business networks that you might have as well.
Amritpal Slaich 1:09:59
None.
Alison Lawson 1:10:23
And think about what you can learn from other businesses. Definitely use the tools that we have provided today in terms of going to the cybersecurity.
Websites and just find out the different tools that are available there, but it's really useful to talk about it rather than just do it yourself as a paper exercise and don't feel that you could just do it all on one go. You can do a little bit and come back to it. You might want to go back and watch some of the bits of the video to help you answer some of those questions, but always have in mind that the whole point of this exercise is to try and improve the way you work improves the way that you gather.
And manage and use data.
Amritpal Slaich 1:11:03
Absolutely.
Alison Lawson 1:11:05
Here are the useful links.
Amritpal Slaich 1:11:07
Yeah. So let's check your cybersecurity, cyber essentials free cyber action plan information was more medium sized companies and small business guide cybersecurity. These are all from the national Cyber Security Centre.
Alison Lawson 1:11:20
It's really pretty useful links definitely have a look at those.
Amritpal Slaich 1:11:26
And there's also a last link for the National Federation of self-employed and small businesses, a complete guide to all U KG DPR compliance with small businesses. So it's all useful stuff.
And finally.
Alison Lawson 1:11:41
Thank you very much.
Amritpal Slaich 1:11:42
Thank you. Thank you.
Alison Lawson 1:11:44
Yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the session.
Amritpal Slaich 1:11:45
Thank you from me.
Alison Lawson 1:11:48
And as you said, do go back and have a look at your organisation and think about how those different tools can be useful to you and how you can be more aware of the data you collect and what use it is to you, how you protect it, keep it safe and how you can use it effectively for your businesses. Because as we said earlier, the data is a gold mine.
It becomes a really important asset for your business and the way that digital transformation will affect your business is also worth remembering that how you gather data now might not be how you want to gather it tomorrow or a year from now. The kind of data you need today might not be the same as the kind of data you need tomorrow or a year from now, and just keeping your eye on that horizon of which bits of technology, which bits of kit are just coming over the horizon that might affect my business, might affect my sector.
Competitors doing what do I need to be aware of? How much do I want to take that risk to invest in this new bit of kit or invest in this new software or new technology because it is an investment and that means risk. But what the benefits as I think there's quite a lot of thinking around digital transformation and and how it will affect your data, your business, your operating models, your your eventual success as an SME.
Amritpal Slaich 1:13:08
And the other thing is as you as we said earlier, as you go on this journey, you're going to capture more data. So you know how will you analyse it? How will you learn from it to improve your you know, understand your customers, understand what they're buying, what they're doing just to kind of make more effective decisions for the better of your company for the success of your company? Absolutely.
Alison Lawson 1:13:23
Mm hmm mm hmm.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Hope you've enjoyed the session and do get in touch with us. If you have any queries at the University of Derby. Thank you and goodnight. Bye.
Amritpal Slaich 1:13:40
Thank you. Thank you and goodnight. Bye bye.
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