by 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years only. And the truth is, the amount of data generated by people and companies keep increasing exponentially every single day. We are now in the age of Big data where the speed, variety and complexity of data is only ever going to increase.
A company can either chose to stay as an emotion driven culture (using gut feelings from a few leaders) or move towards a data driven culture. Emotion driven culture is ideal when the leaders are experts, company data is not available and the company’s data scientist/analyst is weak. Even if primary data is not available, there is a lot of secondary data being created everyday which can be used to help make decisions. Secondly, while the company is stuck in the emotion driven culture, the company’s competitors are busy capturing customer data, mining the data and developing new products.
To be clear, for a company to adopt a data driven culture does not mean that the company relies only on pure numbers to make decisions, but it means that the company encourages data analysis, data interpretation skills and critical thinking, which in tend enables the company identify when they should rely on data and when not to rely on data.
Following this logic, therefore, with the current level of advancement in data creation, companies have no choice but to move to a data driven culture.
For a company to adopt a data driven culture does not mean that the company relies only on pure numbers to make decisions, but it means that the company encourages data analysis, data interpretation skills and critical thinking, which in tend enables the company identify when they should rely on data and when not to rely on data.
So why should companies today switch from their current emotion driven decision making culture to a more data driven culture or information based culture.
- More Collaboration between workers:
- The typical company with instinct based culture typically has staff divided and with many silos, preventing collaboration and communication between the silos. The business analysts on the one end, build models and collect deep insights from their models and instead of sharing with sales or customer care all this insight stays within the business analysis silo.
- While Sales people receive feedback from customers at the point of sales, and instead of transmitting these to the product team, this information stays in the Sales silo. Whereas, if the company could foster a more data culture and information based system, the company will not only benefit from data being shared among the different silos, but will also encourage collaboration between them and hence break down the walls of these silos.
- Enhance Data Democratization
- With a data driven culture in place, there bottlenecks will be eliminated and everyone will be able to contribute and share in the information generated by the data. For example, in most companies IT department is the boss or act as the “owner” of data, where any other department needing data have to go through them to get the data.
- Whereas in a data driven company, data democratization will be encouraged , as the outputs of the analysis of one department, will be the inputs of the model of another department, and so forth.
- Facilitating new product development
- In emotion based companies, most products are developed in the executive meeting without any real input data from the customers. So most companies are based on the idea of a few directors which, most of the time is not in line with the needs of the target customer.
- While completion who have adopted the data culture are collecting data, analyzing launching new products and subsequently modifying them to satisfy the customers’ needs, the company stuck in the emotion based culture will be losing market share to these more dynamic competitors.
- For a company to adopt a data driven culture does not mean that the company relies only on pure numbers to make decisions, but it means that the company encourages data analysis, data interpretation skills and critical thinking, which in tend enables the company identify when they should rely on data and when not to rely on data.
- The main aim is to empower all employees to actively use data to enhance their daily work and to fully utilize a company’s potential by making decisions more successful, initiatives more effective and competitive advantages more striking.
The ultimate goal is to build a cultural framework that helps all members of the organization to collaborate to move data at the center of decision-making – from the data owner, to the data scientist, to the business analyst and finally to the employees who use it in their business department. This encompasses coming up with new, data-driven use cases, discovering patterns in data and experimenting with analytics solutions to see what really works in operational processes.
The preconditions for establishing a data-driven culture are access to data, governance of usage and quality of data, methodological knowledge on how to analyze data and appropriate technologies to prepare and analyze data. It’s not only about where to find data, knowing how to visualize it and analyse it. It’s about supporting & advising people to think in a data driven way.