How to apply a data-driven culture

What is the data-driven approach?
Benefits of data-driven decision making
You will make decisions supported by up-to-date information
Your business will save money
You and your team will be more proactive
Promotes collaboration between different teams
How to apply a data-driven culture in organizations?
How to create a data-driven culture?
Involve the leadership team
Set your goals based on data
Carry out specialized training
Enable data democratization
Use the right tools to analyze data
How to improve your data analysis strategy?
Determine what you are going to measure
collect the data
Analyze the collected information
Interpret the results

What is the data-driven approach?
A data-driven approach refers to decisions that are based on the analysis and interpretation of hard data rather than observation. This ensures that solutions and plans are supported by credible information and not just sentiment or anecdotal evidence. Thus, the data-driven approach is the practice of collecting and analyzing data to draw conclusions and solutions in order to predict the future by using past and current information. Without data, we can make false assumptions based on biased opinions. Today, companies use Big Data analytics, diagnostic modeling, and data processing to stand out in the competitive market.

Thanks to new technological advances, processes such as data storage, processing and analysis have become faster and cheaper. You should keep in mind that creating a data-driven culture is essential for any company to move forward and become a successful organization. A data-driven culture involves the use of data in decision-making by treating data as a strategic asset of the company by making data widely available and accessible. This approach focuses on capturing, cleansing, and using meaningful data from across the enterprise. Having a solid foundation of data is essential to differentiate the business through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Benefits of data-driven decision making

You will make decisions supported by up-to-date information

By collecting and analyzing data, you will arrive at a decision that is safe and supported by information and facts. The data will also allow you to better understand the impact any decision you make will have on your business.

Data is logical and concrete in a way that intuition simply isn’t. Safe decisions allow the organization to commit to a particular vision or strategy without worrying about making poor decisions. However, the fact that a decision is based on data does not mean that it will always be correct. To make good decisions, the data collection and analysis process must be flawless. Any decision based on inaccurate data would be detrimental to the organization. That is why the impact of every business decision needs to be measured and monitored regularly.

Your business will save money

There are many reasons why a business might choose to become a data-driven organization. According to a recent survey of the Fortune 1,000 by NewVantage Partners for the Harvard Business Review, of organizations that have started projects designed to cut costs, more than 49 percent have seen value in their projects. Other initiatives have yielded mixed results. According to Randy Bean, CEO and managing partner of consulting firm NewVantage Partners, “big data is already being used to improve operational efficiency and the ability to make informed decisions based on the latest and most up-to-date information is fast becoming mainstream. rule.”

You and your team will be more proactive

The data will help you identify business opportunities before your competition, or detect threats before they become too serious. If you use the information correctly you will be able to take better advantage of the resources you already have; you will be able to expand and multiply to produce new resources and work in a more proactive way.

Promotes collaboration between different teams

A data-driven culture is essential to improve collaboration between different teams in a company. The information obtained through advanced and predictive data analysis can help other members of the organization in their daily work and connect the ideas of different departments. Building a data-driven culture across the enterprise is essential to moving beyond a few successful data initiatives and islands of excellence limited to certain business areas.

How to apply a data-driven culture in organizations?

A data-driven culture embraces the use of data in decision-making and treats it as a strategic company asset by making it widely available and accessible. This approach focuses on capturing, cleansing, and curating meaningful data from across the enterprise and encourages experimentation to learn and improve. A solid database is essential to differentiate your business from the competition and also helps everyone to perform better.

How to create a data-driven culture?

A data-driven culture not only understands and values the use of data in decision making; it also embraces a culture of innovation and relevant conversations across departments.

Here are some steps every organization can take to foster an environment.

Involve the leadership team

Great companies lead by example from the top, and to build a data-driven culture, you’ll need business leaders who support and actively engage with it. Leaders will need to understand that a data-driven culture goes beyond using data to justify a decision, but rather using data as the primary driver for making a decision. This will allow a better organization of the business units and will facilitate collaborations between the different departments.

Set your goals based on data

Data is not an end product; they are a means to achieve other goals. You can have all the data in the world, but unless you use it efficiently, it means nothing. To integrate data into your production, marketing and sales strategies, you will need to set goals and parameters. For example, if you want to increase revenue, you need to collect and analyze sales data to see the numbers and see how to retarget the catalog. Simply and concisely, data is a tool that will help you make better decisions.

Carry out specialized training

Understanding and using data may be new to most workers. The role of department leaders is to drive the team towards a data-driven culture through conversations and workshops to educate employees on how to read, understand and process the data they will work with during their daily tasks. In addition, organizations can rotate their data specialists across departments to break down barriers between the IT department and the company’s business units. This will help develop an environment of trust and collaboration.

Enable data democratization

In a data-driven culture, all executives can easily access the data they need to make better decisions. Data democratization requires a structured data agenda, protocols to ensure end users exposed to certain data understand it, and data security to safeguard all relevant information.

The challenge of data democratization can be easily solved by using an intuitive business intelligence platform powered by analytics.

Use the right tools to analyze data

Data analysis can be complex if you don’t have the right tools. Today, you will find a large collection of tools on the market that can help you make the most of the information obtained. Using the right tools can turn your data into readable graphs that will make it accessible to anyone who needs it. If you don’t have the right set of tools, you won’t get the most out of your data.

How to improve your data analysis strategy?

To improve your data analysis skills and simplify decisions, we suggest that you follow these steps in your data analysis process.

Determine what you are going to measure

When answering this question, you will likely have to answer many sub-questions such as:

Decide how to measure it
Set the schedule
Choose the factors to include
collect the data

With questions clearly defined and priorities established, you can start collecting data. Before that, determine what information you could pull from existing databases or sources and collect that data first.

If you need to collect data through observation or interviews, develop an interview template ahead of time to ensure consistency and save time. Always keep collected data organized in a log with collection dates and add source notes as you go.

Analyze the collected information

Once you’ve collected the right data, it’s time to do some deeper analysis. Start sorting the data in different ways to find correlations. You can also create a pivot table in Excel that allows you to sort and filter data by different variables and calculate the mean, maximum, minimum, standard deviation and more. As you manipulate the data, you may find that you have the information you need. However, sometimes you will realize that you need to collect more data. Either way, this initial analysis of trends, correlations, and variances will help you focus your analysis on better answering the relevant questions.

Interpret the results

After analyzing, it’s time to interpret your results. As you do this, ask yourself these key questions:

Does the data answer your original question? How?

Does the data help you defend against any objections? How?

Are there any limitations to your conclusions, any angles you haven’t considered?

After answering all of these questions, the only remaining step is to use the results of your data analysis process to decide on the best course of action.

By following these five steps in your data analysis process, you are likely to make better decisions for your organization because they are backed by data that has been accurately collected and analyzed. With practice, your data analysis will become faster and more accurate, and you and your team will make more informed and effective decisions.