Having said that, we do have examples of organization that have done it successfully. So, what are the common traits among these data driven organizations?
Unlike Tradition Organizations,
Data driven organizations which have their business model around data are growing exponentially. Take for example, Amazon, Google or Facebook, they have their business model around exploiting vast amounts of data.
Agreed that not all organizations are in same industry domain as the examples given above, but many of them are striving to become data driven organizations and are placing data in the forefront of their overall strategy.
But firstly, what is a Data Driven Organization?
It means an organization that is willing invest in people, processes and tools to complement human decision making with data and analytics. These companies have data centric approach that is not just looking at operational benefits but long-term strategic goals.
However, becoming a data-driven business is not as straight forward as it seems, else every organization would have done it by now. The businesses are already complex enough – set company strategy, satisfy customers, beat the competition, be aware of regulatory compliance etc. Add to these that they need to have focus on data and analytics as part of the strategy and they start struggling to juggle too many things.
Link Data to their
Business Agenda
Data Driven Culture in
the Organization
Necessary IT
Infrastructure
Privacy Regulations
They Link Data to their Business Agenda:
The business leaders and data experts find a common ground to engage and to ensure data activities are not too low-level, short-term, and poorly connected to business strategy. These common grounds can be on
- 01. Processes Improvement
- 02. Competitive advantage driven by data and analytics
- 03. Introducing new service or products
- 04. Employee re-skilling
- 05. Compliance and risk management
Once the common ground is identified, the low hanging fruits are first targeted. These are most likely to be more profitable & adoptable across the organizations. The momentum can be carried forward to solve bigger and complex problems
There is a data driven culture in the organization
Data is at the centre of everything, they have a company-wide data strategy in place to avoid information silos. With this top-down driven, bottom-up commitment approach, use of data and analytics is not just for the senior management but for the front-line managers who have access to analytics driven insights at their fingertips to take day to day decisions.
They also hire and train right talent to be able to adapt to fast changing tool and technologies in the space of data management, governance and analytics.
They leverage analytics not just to help customers but also employees and have an embedded culture of rewarding data collectors led by executives who want to know what the data suggest, who develop a decision-making structure that includes analytics, and who base plans on the insights generated.
They have necessary IT Infrastructure
There are abundant tools, technologies and platforms available in the market that will enable organizations to become data driven. Organizations need to pick and choose the right set of tools that will seamlessly take them through the entire journey of collecting data to storing, to governing, to analysing and visualizing the insights.
Legacy IT structures and architectures may prevent the integration of siloed information. Business and data leaders need to make investments in making the data landscape more agile. This enables data analytics teams to identify new data source (internal or external) and integrate it quickly to generate insights out of it.
These organization don’t see IT as a cost centre but rather make investments to convert them into profit centres.
They are aware of the Privacy regulations
The rise of data-driven organizations mean that petabytes of data are captured and stored for analytics. This may sometimes include customer data, data captured from social media etc. The risks of invasion of privacy, market manipulation and monopolization, however, have dominated the news for quite some time.
That’s why data-driven organizations need to have a profound knowledge of new rules, like GDPR and have processes in place to avoid steep fines and sanctions or even lose their license to operate.
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