Two best practices to go data-driven

Building a data-driven organisation is much harder than it sounds. Between trying to find people with the right data-literacy skills, and fostering an enduring data-driven culture, it is no small feat.

Beyond recruitment and training, there are some measures that organisations can deploy if they want to create a market-leading data-driven business. The following are two best practice initiatives that we see some of the world's best performing data-driven businesses deploying.

Find data stars through data “hackathons”

People are always going to be engaged by some form of competition, and a competition is a great way for discovering the data superstars within each department or team. Similar to the idea of a hackathon in which employees are encouraged to develop innovative solutions to a universal problem, your competition can introduce one or more problems that your employees can solve using data analysis.

Whether the competition takes place on one day, or a period of a few weeks, your employees can be incentivised by monetary rewards to develop metrics, analysis, and reports that solve a particular business challenge – real or hypothetical. By opening up the competition to your entire business, you can begin identifying the data talent you have on the payroll, and earmarking these employees to take part in further data projects.

Establish your own data Centre of Excellence

Every business is seeking to become more data-driven in today's digital economy. That means that data is no longer just the responsibility of your IT or analytics team. Establishing a Data Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a great way to spread the responsibility and ownership of data-driven culture across your entire business. While one department or business unit can take a leadership role over the CoE, representatives from each business unit can be represented in the CoE depending on their relative level of data-literacy.

Through regular meetings and correspondence, the CoE can establish common processes and standards for data governance. These can then be championed by the representatives of the CoE to their respective teams. This ensures that data literacy projects and data governance initiatives are always on the agenda for each business unit, and that the organisation's key data-driven strategies are being communicated at every level.

As I've said before, becoming a data-driven business is about more than technology for collecting and processing data. You need to find and develop data-literacy across your business, while encouraging everyone in your business to develop a relative level of comfort with data. Ultimately, this is a people-centred change management program – one that will ensure your other technology projects achieve their stated goals.

About the author:

As the Founder and Director of Velocity Business Solutions, my team and I work as collaborative consultants to help our clients utilise world-leading data analytics and visualisation tools, while also offering a range of services including deployment, education and ongoing support. If you are