What is the importance of data-driven decision making in today’s competitive market?
By providing deeper insights, improving efficiency, mitigating risks, gaining a competitive edge, fostering customer-centricity, driving innovation, and making evidence-based choices, data empowers businesses to thrive and succeed in the market.
Businesses embarking on data-driven initiatives often encounter challenges such as data quality issues, data silos, lack of skilled talent, data governance concerns, overwhelming data volume, unclear objectives, resistance to change, and cost constraints. Addressing these obstacles requires a strategic approach, careful planning, and a commitment to data-driven culture to unlock the full potential of data and gain a competitive advantage.
Develop a plan for your data
Before building data assets, you’ll need to first determine how you plan to use your data. This process includes clearly defining the strategic goals the business wants to achieve, what data is available, and determining if this data is ready to be used. An important step is also creating a data glossary so that the entire business is on the same page when discussing metrics and your data.
Turn your data into an asset
Now that you have a plan, it’s time to put it into action by creating data assets. An asset might include a table in a database, a data model, or a dashboard. Leverage a data warehouse and you’ll be able to create a single source of truth for your business; when paired with a data glossary this creates the foundation for a data-driven culture.
By building robust data pipelines and enforcing data quality checks ensures that business users can trust the assets being produced. Continuous monitoring of these pipelines and assets provides further assurance that the data is accurate and valuable.
Grab a Data Glossary Template Here
Extracting value from your data assets
Once you have clean and reliable data, you can extract value by making informed decisions, enhancing customer experience, optimizing operations, managing risks, innovating, benchmarking, and analyzing financial performance. This is where you go back to your original plan for the data and begin working toward accomplishing goals and finding new insights.
By effectively leveraging clean data, your business can unlock its full potential and drive significant value. Tools such as dashboards and scorecards make it easy for non-technical folks to work with data. At this stage, sharing data and focusing on data literacy (by sharing the data glossary) will pay big dividends.