Data-Driven Decision Making To Escalate Business Value
Data is a crucial element. Without strong data management, digital transformation stands unachievable. Organizations that treat data as an asset, maximize the value of the data and thereby their businesses.
With the advent of digitalization, large amounts of data are being generated by companies, individuals, governments, and even connected things. But do all these companies make effective use of data to gain a competitive advantage? To a major extent, no. Gartner estimates that nearly 85% of the Big Data projects fail. In most scenarios, one of the important reasons behind the failures is the capability deficit of collecting the right data based on measurable goals, analyzing, and utilizing them to develop strategies that benefit the business.
Why should a business be data-driven?
According to a report by NewVantage partners, 98.6 percent of executives indicated that their organizations are adopting measures to transform into being data-driven but only 32.4 percent have seen success.
Companies that leverage data to innovate, scale up their business, and to make crucial data-driven decision-making with Artificial Intelligence and Analytics result in improved effectiveness, reduced risk, predict future trends, optimize current operational efforts, and identify new sources of revenues. These capabilities will turn the data-driven organizations to be more customer-focused and competitive.
Benefits of Data-driven decision-making
An organization to be data-driven and data-centric has to incorporate certain core capabilities like data proficiency, analytics, community, etc. Integrating data with analytics and other Data Science, AI technologies will help extract intuitive data intelligence that improves the decision-making cycles and bring a transformative impact on the organization.
Data-driven decisions lead to improved transparency and accountability to every organization as they prioritize every information, create concrete goals, properly manage the data, and thereby measure the results accurately.
An organization that incorporates a data-based decision-making system makes decisions based on facts, thus, efficiently creating a wide opportunity and capacity to scale changes with rapid implementation. It leads the organizations towards constant improvement, enhances its overall performance and efficiency, thereby scaling the overall business of the organization.
Integrating business decisions with intuitive analytical insights helps the organizations to gauge themselves, test different strategies, and make faster and reliable decisions. This approach will improve teamwork and staff management operations as the team can feel a greater sense of control because of the transparency. And above all, data-driven decision-making will result in cost-savings and high revenues.
How to promote data-driven decisions?
Implementing a data-driven approach requires a few steps to be followed that can find answers to the who, what, when, where, and why of the data.
- Identify the business objectives and prioritize them. This will help in identifying and choosing the key performance indicators and the metrics that are required to measure and analyze the data that support the business objectives.
- Identify the relevant data and collect the data from relevant and reliable sources. Sources like website analytics, social media channels, feedback from the customers, business intelligence platforms, CRM software, etc provide the data pertaining to the organization’s objectives.
- Explore and analyze the data to draw conclusions. Identify high ROI opportunities. Historical data provides insights into the patterns or trends. Visualizing these patterns in a more understandable way will have an impact on the decisions along with discovering the hidden opportunities or risks that impact the success of organizations’ objectives.
- Plan the strategy from the derived actionable insights. Enable data as a strategic asset and align the strategy to technology that accelerates Data Science, data innovation, and closed-loop systems of insights. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are proving to be promising with their ability to predict the uncertainties.
- Measure success and repeat, to optimize. Compare the historical data with the new data that was acquired while the decision-making moment. If it gives a positive impact then the decision is a success but if it doesn’t then repeat the steps with different alternatives.
Future is Data-driven
Data is the prime force driving the growth of businesses and plays an important part in maintaining a competitive edge and business relevance. The value of data lies in its potentiality to generate insights that lead to better business. Therefore organizations should lay the foundation to streamline their data management processes and real-time analytics while developing a data-driven culture.