Delhi, March 20, 2020 - In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is not just an advantage for organizations to use data to make intelligent business decisions but a necessity. But in reality many organizations struggle to do so due to lack of proper understanding:

“How do we bring on this data revolution and embrace the change”?

“From where do we start”?

An initiative to make data a “strategic business asset” must stem from a vision to create a data-driven culture that leverages data-driven insights for improved decision-making, enhanced operational efficiency, increased financial gains and a clear edge over competitors.

As per McKinsey Global Institute, that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain those customers, and as a result 19 times as likely to be profitable.

Here are 5 steps to enable enterprises become a data-driven business and enjoy benefits along the way

1. Establish a Data Strategy

Data can empower an organization to collate huge information about its business operations, industry and customers, offering significant potential to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, transforming an organization into a data-driven business is critical. Though a time-consuming process, it garners enormous benefits in the long run.
However, if the strategy behind this transformation is not established correctly, it can result in a continuous accrual of invaluable data points. In order to place data into the DNA of an enterprise, it is important to blend business goals with data strategy. To achieve this, businesses must

Streamline data with business priorities (top-down)
Leverage data for strategic advantage
Align people, process and business culture around data
Integrate various data sources and manage them intelligently
This would set the stage for the work ahead and help each department with a smooth transition.

2. Develop a Data-Driven Culture

To extract accurate insights from structured and unstructured data, the leaders must focus on cultivating a data-driven culture that ensures that employees have the right resources and skills to leverage data and are able to make explicit business decisions at the right time.

According to a recent research from CrowdFlower, 83% of organizations are struggling to meet the data skills requirements they need.Leaders must acknowledge and reward employees who advance in data and are able to generate insights that help in achieving a business goal such as understanding customers in a better way or penetrating new markets. It is also important to create a highly collaborative and embedded structure that allows all the teams (technical and non-technical) to bridge the gap and work together on the data seamlessly, thus maximizing the benefits of data.

3. Spot the Key Sources of Data and Make the Data Usable

Data keeps flowing from a variety of sources, right from customer interactions to the tools used by the HR and the Marketing teams. It’s important to manage these different streams of data and identify the key areas that are essential in achieving the overall business strategy. Keeping a track of the right data points ensures that data-driven decisions are in synergy with the day-to-day operations. Advance Analytics and AI cannot deliver the desired business result unless the data is "Right" and "Usable".

4. Consume Data the Right Way using Data Lakes

In order to make the data “Usable”, it’s important to implement a common data lake platform capable of ingesting and storing all kinds of structured and unstructured data as it offers easy access to useful data and manage access rights to system and data. Smooth access to data enables senior management to easily spot meaningful insights from it. The data lake enables customer to consume the data in a right way to analyze the trend/changes which helps in quick decision making to create new business opportunity.

5. Turn Useful Insights into the Right Decisions

Simply having huge amount of data at your disposal can’t really help in improving the business performance. It’s true value is derived only when businesses draw meaningful insights from the data. Business intelligence tools help enterprises generate meaningful insights from even the most complex sets of data. It is critical to ensure that these insights become the impetus for top-level decision-making that allows management to define what actions need to be taken in future and ultimately achieve the business goals.

Plan your own Journey

These are just 5 steps to becoming a data-driven organization, but the list could be longer. Depending upon business conditions and other imperatives, a typical journey might vary from organization to organization. Nonetheless, harnessing data, gathering useful insights and using those insights to make meaningful business decisions is something that remains constant. Companies with best strategies for making data central to strategic decision-making are bound to experience a significant advantage.