Successful Analytics – What It Takes to Be a Truly Data-Driven Organization!

Data Analytics is the pivot around which the modern-day business landscape revolves. Most organizations today are investing in the latest technology, hiring high-skill employees, and leveraging data analytics – but does that make them truly data-driven? Not entirely.

Simply having access to data is not enough. To achieve true analytics success, businesses must ensure their data is accurate, actionable, and aligned with their goals. According to a?study by NewVantage Partners, only?26.5% of companies?report that they have been successful in creating a data-driven organization, despite 97% of them investing in big data and AI.

These statistics suggest that while many companies are investing in big data and AI, they are struggling to fully leverage these technologies to build a data-driven organization. Lack of clear strategy, poor quality data, lack of skilled talent, and resistance to change are some of the major reasons that prevent companies from extracting maximum business value from their investments in these technologies.?

How Can You Ensure You’re Leveraging Data Analytics to the Fullest?

The use of analytics has become rather common across all industries in today's ever evolving business environment. By leveraging data to drive insights and decision-making, businesses can gain a competitive edge and achieve better outcomes. However, the effectiveness of data analytics hinges on its proper utilization.

Achieving successful analytics entails more than simply having specialist data scientists working in silos. It necessitates a shift in organizational thinking towards one that adapts well to the changing dynamics of the business market and technology that streamlines operations and measures revenue growth.

When data is collected, processed, and analyzed effectively it can become a fundamental driver of success for businesses. The effective utilization of data analytics depends on several crucial factors, starting from identifying business objectives to presenting insights, and incorporating feedback for continuous improvement.?

“Insight generation is great. When it comes to analytics, what you do with that insight is equally important. That’s part of the business efficiency.” – Prasanth Southekal

Best Practices to Extract the Most Out of Data Analytics:

Prashanth Southekal?– an author, professor, and head of?DBP-Institute?(Data for Business Performance) highlights the three crucial tenets of achieving analytics success in an article published by MIT Sloan School of Management:

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• Adopt an Analytical Perspective to Defining Business Objectives:?Identify key business objectives and align your analytics efforts with them. The idea is to adopt an analytics perspective on data by aligning the questions posed by the business with the appropriate data types required to provide answers. This helps in prioritizing what data to collect, how to classify and analyze it, and how to use it to drive insights and decisions. Classifying business data by type, such as reference data, master data, and transactional data, and developing conversion rules to transform data for analytics can also be really helpful.??
• Effective Data Governance and Sourcing: To ensure the quality, ownership, and security of data, organizations must establish data governance policies and procedures for data collection, storage, and usage. Rather than waiting for perfect data, businesses can strategically source data, balance the cost of acquisition with its value by using sampling or feature engineering to enhance data quality, and explore data collection methods that align with the business objectives.?
• Make Actionable Analytics the Goal:?Businesses should not only focus on running analytics projects to gather insights from their data, but they should also aim to turn those insights into actionable analytics products that can improve overall business performance. Instead of just conducting one-off data analysis projects, businesses can rather build analytics products that can be used continuously to drive business decisions and outcomes. These products could take the form of dashboards, reports, predictive models, or other tools that provide valuable insights to business stakeholders.

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These three tenets by themselves are not sufficient to leverage data analytics effectively. They should be looked at as fundamental prerequisites for organizations to become truly data-driven. To complement these principles, businesses can also follow some general rules to achieve successful outcomes. These include building high-performance teams, focusing on descriptive analytics and key performance indicators to build data literacy, refining analytics models continuously, and using data storytelling to promote insights.

In conclusion, analytics success requires a multifaceted approach that includes technology, processes, people, and culture. Whether you're a small start-up or a large enterprise, it is clear that data analytics is the elixir to succeeding in today’s complex business world.?