4 Secrets to Data-Driven Business

Using information to get more out of your business operations is nothing new, However in the era of digitalisation, 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 on 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.

Having one Success Defining Metric and uniting people around it

? Wouldn’t it be better to analyse EVERYTHING? ? is the answer we usually get when we make this kind of proposal, ? I mean isn’t it better just to use all what 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 will allow 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 ?.

Creating a Data Culture

Which is the first and most important part of the puzzle, the cornerstone of a data-driven organisation is treating Information like a precious ressource, not only to specific areas of the business, but also as 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 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 for employees if they are asked to engage in analysis for it’s 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.

Facilitating Data Competency

If you expect all of the above from your business, it’s 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 of Management-level training is a little different than employee Data-training, where one is more about the extraction of knowledge from existing facts, where 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 envaded 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)

Having the right data accessible to everyone, Everywhere.

Sometimes even an 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 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 organisation to be data-driven is crucial, and being early always is a huge advantage.