Using information to get more out of your business operations is nothing new, However, in the era of digitalization, we’ve seen a lot of emerging tools and techniques that are completely changing the shape of businesses.
In fact, we know you know that data is important based on the State of Analytics 2016 report, 86% of industry professionals believe analytics is critical to their decision-making process.
But just to emphasize it, Analysts at Forrester Research have identified a new type of organization, the “insights-driven business “or that can also be called “data-driven “, which they claim are growing at an average of more than 30% annually and are on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021.
We’ve put together these 4 pillars that can help you drive your organization towards being Data-driven:
1. Having one Success Defining Metric and uniting people around it
“ Wouldn’t it be better to analyze EVERYTHING? “ Is the answer we usually get when we make this kind of proposal, “I mean, isn’t it better just to use all that we have and take out everything we can from it “.
The answer is always “yes, but… “ Because you see, if you’re going to make a change towards a data-driven culture, you would want Accessibility and Simplicity over Complexity and Richness. To encourage your employees and executives to easily get on board.
That’s not the only reason, though, having a single success-defining metric and uniting the whole company around it allows you to define your user experience and not fall into the traps of “Data Pollution”.
It allows you to easily see actions you must take based on what you know, and push success forward. Using the additional Data from other metrics as a “means to an end “.
2. Creating a Data Culture
This is the first and most important part of the puzzle, the cornerstone of a data-driven organization is treating Information like a precious resource. Not only to specific areas of the business, but also as a key part in the strategic decision-making process, and as fuel for developing insights that can feed into innovation and new product development.
A culture that pays respect to the collection, storage, and analysis of data. And this can even start at the recruitment level, where a question like “Have you ever used Data in making decisions in the past? “
Of course how important is not obvious to employees if they are asked to engage in analysis for its own sake, the main objective should always be to make better decisions faster.
To help drive this culture, data must remain accessible and employees should be encouraged to include facts and statistics in their reports.
3. Facilitating Data Competency
If you expect all the above from your business, its employees need to be trained and provided with the right tools that democratize this task enough to be accessible to even the non-Data scientists.
This of course starts from the top down, even management-level training is a little different from employee Data-training, where one is more about the extraction of knowledge from existing facts, whereas the other is more about structuring and presenting that data well.
We at Dash believe that we are on the verge of a revolution similar to the 80s revolution of computing, where companies had to set strategies to train employees from all backgrounds on using computers.
The same would have to be done for analytics & self-service BI tools. Computing technology has now invaded the workplace in all fields, so in order to stay competitive, companies would have to launch similar strategies. Ideally, hiring a CDO (Chief Data Officer) or a CTO (Chief Technical Officer).
4. Having the right data accessible to everyone, Everywhere!
Sometimes even in the so-called “data-driven” companies, data can be in Silos (divided by product or by functional area like marketing and sales for example) making it hard to access, Management consultant and writer Patrick Lencioni in his book Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars puts it perfectly:
“Silos — and the turf wars they enable — devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals.”
In today’s world, you would expect your clients to buy multiple products from you, repetitively, and they expect you to know them and understand them as one person, across all these products and different touchpoints with the company.
This is where hiring a BI or Data management firm can be quite helpful, to help you structure your Data, and to cross it between different departments and areas, and present it in the simplest and most understandable, and most importantly Actionable way.
No corporation could stay relevant trying to resist Computing or The internet, and so no business can ignore Data-Driven culture and remain competitive in today’s accelerating, unstable environment.
So driving your organization to be data-driven is crucial, and being early always is a huge advantage.