4 steps how to move towards data-driven management

All over the world, digital businesses are implementing a growing number of best-of-breed systems, leading to data residence in various functional silos. In addition, a lot of management processes are still done in Excel or other disintegrated tools. This makes comprehensive data-driven executive management one of the largest challenges faced by executives.

While large enterprises can hire expensive consultants, SMEs overcome their financial and personal limitations by sourcing productized solutions with best-practice templates embedded.?

Specifically, they expect an integrated solution to:

• include best-practice content
• be easy to use with limited maintenance effort
• proven implementation process that goes hand in hand with the software itself

And therefore, optimize time to usage, generate superior insights and limit effort and cost.?

It is our core belief, that achieving this is only possible when utilizing the power of vertical SaaS or the “industry cloud“. This means that the software needs to be tailored for each industry‘s specific needs.?

Hence, at ValueWorks, we do not just want to give you an empty technical shell, but we provide you with all the content, technology,?and support so you do not need to start the next analytics mega project.

In this paper, we want to lay out a pragmatic and cost-efficient approach for SMEs and corporate startups to get up running in the speed of light.?

What is data-driven executive management?

Executive management refers to management tasks done by the highest leadership level of a company. This includes planning, reporting, execution (OKR), early warning, issue-root-cause-identification, and subsequent action definition on company-level.?

In this context, data-driven executive management refers to these tasks being fully integrated and informed or enriched by all the internal and external data available to the company in a fully or semi-automated way using statistical and AI-based methods. The focus of this is to enable the manager to make smarter decisions, but also to eliminate repetitive tasks.

Why data-driven executive management?

Data-driven management aims to improve the quality of insights and decisions and to increase further automation of management tasks.?

Compare it with an “intelligence augmentation” for your executives to free up time for other tasks that cannot be automated.?

Here are some use cases:

• Industry-specific planning?module with standard parameters to minimize customization need
• Early warning?if certain KPIs exceed certain threshold levels
• Integration?between planning, reporting and execution data to reduce manual copy-past errors
• Utilization of?benchmarking?data to calibrate your performance against other companies in your industry

How to move towards data-driven management leveraging ValueWorks?

ValueWorks has a 4-steps approach to quickly ramp you up.

1) Select your industry template and quickly enhance it with your custom KPIs.?As per our experience with existing customers, 95% of the content included will already be sufficient to cover your full planning, reporting and execution needs.

2) Integrate your existing data sources,?either though live integration using standardized authorization mechanisms (e.g., Oauth) or Excel upload w/ built in quality check. Through our standardized” data wizards” your data sources can be quickly set live. ValueWorks will assist you throughout the process.

3)??Introduce processes and enable your teams.?To get most out of your system, enabling your teams is the most critical piece to create the value. As ValueWorks, we make the software as easy and fun to use as possible, as this is the most critical factor in getting processes to work on the long run.?

4) Bring your management to the next level with powerful use cases.