Market Perspectives

The 15th annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. These leaders and pioneers have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded its prestigious 2022 Overall Digital Leadership Award to Sainsbury’s using MicroStrategy. This is the most prestigious award offered, as it is given to the individual, organization and technology provider that best exemplifies Overall Leadership. All award finalists in our areas of expertise — Analytics, Customer Experience, Data, Digital Business, Digital Technology, Human Capital Management, Marketing, Office of Finance, Office of Revenue and Operations and Supply Chain — were considered for this award.

Ventana Research selected Sainsbury’s for the 15th Annual Overall Digital Leadership Award for its utilization of analytics in its operations, enabling optimization of store actions and rapid response to the impact of technology. J Sainsbury plc, trading as Sainsbury's, is the second largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, with over 600 supermarkets, over 800 convenience stores with 171,000 workers. Founded in 1869 by John James Sainsbury with a shop in Drury Lane, London, the company was the largest UK retailer of groceries for most of the 20th century.

The Sainsbury’s initiative allowed leadership to transform the organization and democratize its data, operationalizing analytics and empowering its retail strategy. Workers use trusted insights to make informed business decisions and work smarter each day. The organization can rapidly adapt to evolving customer expectations around the shopping experience. Sainsbury’s unified its data fabric and instilled a data-driven culture across its enterprise to embrace change. It implemented a unified data and analytics strategy to establish a trusted data fabric suited for the entire organization. Use of the MicroStrategy Cloud enabled business continuity via sustainable and scalable resourcing by hundreds of data and analytics experts across the business. The use of the MicroStrategy platform’s in-memory caching capabilities – on top of Snowflake data warehouses – ensures data is available at a cost structure that meets Sainsbury’s requirements.

Democratization of trusted, consistent data across thousands of users and dozens of applications helps streamline store operations and insights to enhance the customer experience through web and mobile access. A broad range of use cases include price positioning, market basket analyses, supply chain, merchandising, loyalty and incentives. Business analysts, developers, architects and administrators also have more learning and growth potential within the data, analytics and technology functions at Sainsbury’s because there is a single, scalable technology used across the business. There’s lots of room to learn, develop new skills and achieve upward mobility within the organization.

Ultimately, Sainsbury’s recognized that delivering unified information across its business could have a transformative impact while helping deliver the best value to customers. Adopting a bold strategy helped Sainsbury’s rethink its approach to data democratization, resulting in broad analytics adoption for everyday decision-making across its operations.

Overall Digital Leadership spans all software categories in need of innovation and optimization. MicroStrategy addresses the challenges of providing analytics across the range of roles and responsibilities in a cloud and simplified manner. Organizations that want to make analytics available in an operational manner will appreciate MicroStrategy’s platform and its ability to assemble applications and embed them into business processes.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how analytics can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how MicroStrategy can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Helen Hunter and Sainsbury’s, for your leadership.

Organizations can achieve significant innovation through the deployment and use of digital technology for business. Examining how to maximize potential and increase the sophistication of expertise like customer experience, finance, human capital management, marketing, revenue and operations and supply chain requires assessing and prioritizing technology investments.

Ventana Research offers research-based guidance on embracing digital technology to increase the workforce’s ability to reach full potential. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and to enable business resilience and overall readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.