Did you know? For a Fortune 1000 company, an increase of 10% in data accessibility can resultin over $65 million additional net income.

As data becomes the new oil, organizations have realized the importance of harnessing the power of structured and unstructured data to derive maximum business benefits. Data analytics helps companies gain deep insights on their core processes, products, and services and identify areas that need improvement based on hard facts. Companies relying on data analytics for their decision-making are able to gain better competitive edge in the market, improve their workforce productivity, and also boost their business effectiveness and efficiency.

Let’s closely examine how organizations can use data analytics as a valuable tool for their business and achieve greater success.

Data-Driven Decision-Making – The Need of the Hour

• According to the studies conducted by professors of MIT Sloan Management and based on their survey of companies at MIT Center for digital business, data-driven companies had 4% more productivity and 6% more profits as compared to the rest of them.
• In a data-driven company, everyone has easy and quick access to data which facilitates better decision-making. All the employees have full control to explore data independently, even while working in different functional areas and business problems. Apart from the ability to draw data from a variety of internal and external sources, they are able to integrate the data through analytics to derive actionable insights for their business.
• With the surge of data-driven culture and complexity of data, companies are able to merge different departments to utilize their individual strengths far more effectively and get more value from the data.
• Data-driven companies are able to create processes and operations which allow for greater transparency regarding data access restrictions as well as data governance methods. Besides, it allows them to treat data as assets while helping them to address gaps in data, maintain information aligned with the core business strategy, and enhance data quality with a goal to facilitate smarter decision-making.

Key Traits of Data-Driven Companies That Makes Them Successful

As data continues to grow at an exponential rate than ever before, organizations are looking at different ways to utilize the plethora of information that is available to them. Successful companies have inculcated a data-driven culture within their organizations. They empower their employees to make decisions based on hard data instead of gut feeling. They have streamlined processes to capture, process, and analyze data – in real-time.

Let us take a quick look at some of the common traits shared by the successful data-driven companies:

Data-driven companies use creative approaches for sourcing data

The key issue faced by companies is the lack of knowledge of using the existing (structured and unstructured) data for decision-making process. There are a lot of insights that can be gained from say, social media data, sensor data, customer data, or even employee data. Data-driven organizations lay great emphasis on finding out innovative ways to source data through internal and external sources. Quite understandably, not all the data is useful. Data-driven organizations first define the goals that they want to achieve through data analytics and then define the right data sources based on that.

 

Focus on building data-driven culture within the organization

Data-driven organizations identify the right opportunities to inculcate relevant employee behaviors to ensure that fact-based decision-making becomes a core part of their workforce. The top leadership plays a critical role in ensuring that this culture is adapted by all within the organization. They focus on breaking the data silos and facilitating data sharing. These organizations also ensure that the data is democratized and everyone has access to the right data.

Display solid leadership skills to lead the company

Companies which are data-driven know the importance of having someone at the top position who can lead the team in the right direction. The C-Suite Champion or the Data Champion has a solid grasp of data analytics and understands how it works and can easily relate it to the goals and needs of the business. Besides, such leaders have a good grasp of the company culture and they take special efforts to integrate that into the entire analytics team.

Eliminate data silos to ensure coherent communication across all levels

One of the main requirements to build a solid and successful analytics team is to break down communication barriers across all levels and to make sure that various departments and the analytics team can share valuable information with each other. Data-driven organizations ensure that data flows effortlessly and conveniently across a wide intersection of the company to facilitate data-driven decision-making across all levels.  And more importantly, everyone has access to the same data – of course with the appropriate levels of access and governance policies.

Ensure that their teams are motivated to get the best value from them

Data-driven organizations always engage their teams and build their enthusiasm by involving them into challenging business activities. They focus on continuous improvement, innovation and training of the team at all levels and allow them to evolve in the process. Involved and engaged team members think creatively and innovatively to deliver a greater value to the organization.

Focus on Training and Education

Data-driven organizations understand that the company employees need to be educated and trained to be data literate. They need to be informed on the correct use of data. These organizations invest and focus on training programs to educate the employees on key data metrics, regulations of data usage, and the key benefits. Such educative training programs help in creating analytics-driven mindsets enabling the employees to take data-driven decisions.

In a nutshell, data-driven organizations understand that right data, when sourced, processed and analyzed, reduces uncertainty and drives better decision-making and, therefore, needs to be core to the business strategy.