Data is the key to strategic advantage in business. Effective and strategically applied data and analytics capabilities provide companies with key competitive advantages. In order to achieve this, it’s important for organizations to establish a data driven culture built on a solid foundation of trust.
Where do you even start?
Most businesses either have a lot of data that few people understand or are able to access, or have very little data so rely instead on gut feelings and assumptions.
Neither of these scenarios is ideal.
A data driven culture built on a solid foundation provides companies with key competitive advantages that translate into customer satisfaction, increased sales, and revenue growth. Data-driven organizations make more informed decisions faster than their competition; they produce better products and services while reducing the time to market for new innovations.
To successfully capitalize on the power of data, it’s important to establish trust within your organization so that employees feel safe sharing information without fear of repercussion or consequences. Data becomes useless if it isn’t acted on in a timely manner, and if employees are not confident that their insights will be welcomed, then it’s impossible to make truly informed decisions.
This means that the push to become more data driven needs to come from the top down, from C-suite and senior leadership, with a coordinated effort to increase data literacy across employees of all levels across the business.
It’s also important that the executive team is committed to data-driven decision making, instead of it being a directive for everyone except them. While different industries may face varying levels of difficulty when it comes to implementing these changes, many large organizations are already embracing this shift.
It’s also important to keep in mind that not all data is created equal. It may seem tempting to start by putting the latest and greatest technology into play, but this is often a short-sighted approach that won’t have the desired effect. Without the basics, ie a source of truth and robust scalable infrastructure, more advanced analytics and applications of data will fail.
There are many benefits of being data driven: decision making becomes more informed, risks are better managed, customers can be better understood and engagement improves – all with less cost and effort.
ashleigheg 