Companies that have successfully cultivated a data-driven culture reap a multitude of benefits, from better employee understanding of the value of data and how to apply it to decision-making, to a widespread commitment to backing up ideas with data and measuring outcomes across the board.
Advanced analytics lie at the heart of today’s digital businesses, but success requires a shift in organizational culture. To be data-driven requires an overarching data culture that couples a number of elements, including high-quality data, broad access and data literacy, and appropriate data-driven decision-making processes. In this post, we’ll review some of these key building blocks to help you get started.
When making important strategic decisions at your enterprise, you probably reference relevant information. These likely include revenue projections, sales reports and competitor analyses. In other words, you use data to drive decision-making.
For your employees, using data shouldn’t be the goal in its own right. Instead, you should explain the value of data: drawing insights. To accomplish this, you must give your employees space and time to understand the data they’re working with. If your organization’s leaders take this approach, employees will feel less overwhelmed with the cultural change.
For many employees, advanced analytics may be a somewhat new concept (at least, in the context of a data-driven organization). It’s important that leadership helps bring everyone onto the same page regarding their data knowledge. Training is essential for several reasons:
Establishing a data-driven organizational culture necessitates the right educational resources. When it comes to data, this means having the tools needed for employees to adjust to data-driven workflows. These include:
Changing the culture of an organization never happens overnight, so be patient, take your time and start small. Bringing about this organizational change can be challenging, but the reward is an agile, data-driven organization.
One MIT study found that data-driven companies enjoyed 5–6 percent higher output and productivity. That’s not all—a report by the Aberdeen Group found that data-driven organizations can enjoy a 27 percent increase in year-over-year revenue.