The importance of creating a culture of Data

by Dr. Vibhuti Agrawal

Our past, present and the future are all connected with data—everything around us is numbers. While there is no doubt that data has made itself evident in every segment of our lives, it plays a larger role in our corporate world. Data, big data and data analytics are synonymized versions of each other.

If stats are to be believed, 63% of organizations report that big data and analytics are creating a competitive advantage for their business. Around 83% of business leaders have pursued big data projects to seize a competitive edge. And hence, one must understand the importance of the rising data culture and the importance of creating it.

From better decision making to tracking progress and increasing coordination, creating a data culture caters to a broader goal of better serving organizations, their customers and their consumers. Several organizations collect data but cannot leverage it to the best of their ability, where working with the stored data is required. While storing large amounts of data does not provide any benefits, it pushes toward solving business problems with a data-driven approach. The benefits such as:-

1. Fast and Agile Decision-making

Decision making is the epitome of running any organization. A data-driven culture encourages organizations to make decisions using reliable data to ensure good growth and continuous advancement. Data interpretation and critical thinking are essential for any business, yet, a data-driven culture helps organizations gauge what is the right decision and when it should be implemented for maximum impact. In fact, accurate data collection and monitoring even helps organizations measure the impact or ROI of any decision taken to ensure movement in the right direction or do a course-correction if required.

1. Easier change management

As organizations make data-driven decisions and implement changes, it's easier to get buy-in from employees if these changes are backed by accurate data, demonstrating how any given change will help the organization and thus employees succeed.

Data establishes a storyline that every character must run in accordance with. When you implement a data-driven decision-making process, it is free from individual experience biases. Given that the numbers don’t lie, employees are able to relate the why and what of the change easily, thus streamlining the entire change management process.

1. Reducing costs and enhancing revenues-

Businesses surveyed in a BARC report that use big data saw an average profit increase of 8% and a 10% reduction in overall cost. Creating a data culture can make financial sense in two ways: one, by reducing costs, and two, by increasing revenue.

Organizations tend to reduce costs by simplifying their data estate. This involves standardizing and minimizing tools or at least minimizing the number of tools used which reduces costs directly by eliminating other expenses and indirectly by reducing the effort required in training, support, and related tasks.

The most successful companies have successfully created a data culture, with strong communication in-house and across all departments on a company organizational chart. Whenever communications get slow internally and between teams, it slows down analysis because insights no longer become a priority or urgency without proactive or collaborative efforts. This can leave marketing blind spots unaddressed opportunities for long periods before marketers are alerted to significant issues with years of ROI where the competitive landscape has changed drastically in that time frame.

Data analytics is a necessity just as crucial as any other department. To build the data culture, any organization will need to invest in 3 fundamental functions --

1. Setup Accurate Data Collection Systems

We are highly dependent on data, which emphasizes the importance of collecting it. Accurate data collection is essential to make informed business decisions, ensure quality assurance, and keep research integrity.

1. Build Continuous Data Monitoring Systems

This includes oversight mechanisms that monitor and ensure the quality of each data instance that is created, utilized, and maintained within an organization. It further comprises processes for reviewing data to ensure its completeness, consistency, accuracy, security, and validity.

1. Analyze data and build reports for key metrics and KPIs

Going through the usual internet definition of being a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.

To ensure that all these 3 functions are established properly with the modern data architecture, ensuring proper governance and accuracy of data, organizations also need to invest in setting up dedicated data offices, thus creating roles such as ‘Chief Data Officer’, ‘Data Architects’, and ‘Data Engineers’ in any organization.

Conclusion-
Creating a data-driven culture is the key to success—data is to be considered an integral part of any organization. The collected data will be a source of information for improving business processes, improving decision making, predicting future trends and behavior and a tool for identifying new avenues to generate revenue.

The biggest issue that hinders organizations from setting up a data-driven culture is the mindset. For any organization, the setup of a data-driven culture presents a shift in philosophy, and the decision-making process presents a daunting challenge.

There needs to be a fundamental change in the way organizations work and think. Instead of setting everything up and then thinking about data and utilizing it to achieve the goals or do something better, Data analytics should be utilized as a base that supports and strengthens the org. Data has to be a foundational principle-like CMOS; there should be CDOs that focus essentially on the data segment. Apart from the other departments, be it finance, admin and even HR, the data analytics department should be well incorporated. We need to have a culture shift that does not incorporate data analytics as an add-on but as a necessity.

Dr. Vibhuti Agrawal, Associate Vice President - Analytics, Innovaccer

(DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person / organisation directly or indirectly.)