The importance of having a business data driven culture

The importance of having a business data driven culture

Data-driven decision making is the process of using data to inform your decision-making process and validate a course of action before committing to it. In a time where we are overloaded by data we cannot not understate the importance of making data driven decisions and more importantly injecting a data driven cultural shift in your organization. Being data driven lowers your risk of poor assertiveness by prioritizing evidence over intuition or past experience. Intuition, knowledge and experience are important but it might bias your current situation. 

Benefits of  a Data Driven Approach

According to a survey of more than 1,000 senior executives conducted by PwC, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who rely less on data. In addition, a data-driven culture:

1. Empowers organizations to leverage information for understanding consumer behavior, optimizing operations, and harnessing data effectively.

2. Provides competitive advantage and helps in risk control.

3. Enables the creation of more attractive products and improves profitability while saving costs.

Challenges and Solutions

Challenges such as initial unfamiliarity, a lack of a clear strategy of where to get started and ignorance are often a barrier for organizations to migrate to a data driven culture. The implementation strategy includes hiring and training, promoting data-driven decisions, and implementing incentives for data-oriented actions. Action items include hiring a business intelligence expert, evaluating data visualization platforms, training team members, and implementing incentive systems.

1. Initial organization of data can be expensive, requiring experts like data scientists and paying for data analytics platforms. My personal favorite is tableau but here you can see other options.  

2. Involves training people and changing the organizational mindset from top to bottom. I recommend hiring an external service at first or hiring a business intelligence in house card. 

Implementation Strategy

1. Look for patterns everywhere 

2. Tie every decision back to the data

3. Visualize the meaning behind the data

4. Promote data driven decisions and deny non-data-based decisions. 

5. Implement incentive systems for data-oriented actions.

Last, make sure to invest in a good data visualization tool that enables you to engage and enhance the data interpretation process. Numbers and tables alone will not facilitate your data analysis system. By creating engaging visuals in the form of charts and graphs, you’ll be able to quickly identify trends and make conclusions easier.