Some of the best companies today are leveraging data to spearhead their competitive advantage. Data-driven organizations have been proven to outperform competitors and demonstrate greater profitability. Data is a driving force behind innovation and acts as a point of disruption for the market.
At its core, becoming a data-driven organization means making data and analytics an integral part of your business starting from your strategy and continuing through to delivery. It is a ‘total immersion’ approach to data use: freeing data from silos, making it as available as possible to key teams, and supporting automated, low-latency yet secure analysis to inform business decisions and improve processes in real time.
Becoming data-driven is equivalent to investing in your digital landscape. In fact, big data and AI-powered analytics often go hand in hand with investment in cloud infrastructure, as businesses re-engineer their systems to drive innovation.
A data-driven organization is focused on making better business decisions. This ultimately leads to higher customer satisfaction and greater value generation.
We recently hosted a webinar where 63% of participants said that the biggest challenge to data transformation was their organizational structure and strategy. Meanwhile, 50% said that embedding the right skillsets in their organization was a challenge. Becoming an organization centered on data requires technology support, but to truly incorporate it into the organization’s culture and strategy, you need to approach it as a change management project.
Data can be applied in many ways across an organization. Google has adopted it across every department, particularly for their people analytics department. South West uses it to observe customer behaviour. Data provides a key point of insight that previously was not accessible to organizations, enabling them to make better and faster decisions that drive business value.
Data-driven organizations see the following benefits:
Data provides critical insights to organizations enabling them to make better decisions that drive business value.
Making data and analytics work and scaling it to an enterprise level can provide opportunities for new business models and growth such as customer centricity, revenue growth, delivery efficiency and much more. To achieve this, you must look past technology and adoption and integrate technology and data into your wider business strategy. This requires thinking across multiple departments as well as addressing culture surrounding the deployment of your data-driven strategy.
