There are four key steps you need to take in your organization to create a data-driven culture.
For more information on what a data-driven culture is, check out our blog article HERE.
Creating Data Awareness/Literacy
Data awareness and literacy means that your vast majority of your organization is thinking about how to solve problems by looking at data points to discover the right path forward.
It means that your team members know the right questions to ask and the right data to review and pull together to make informed business decisions. If you don’t know the right data, you are at least thinking about how data can inform your decision.
Creating Data Fluency
Data fluency means that you know how to use, explore, interpret and visualize data in a meaningful way that will inform data decisions.
This means that you not only have an understanding of where to retrieve the data from various sources, you also know how to put that data together for others to absorb, that might not be so close to the data sources themselves.
As an organization, you reach data fluency when you have representatives from all departments that have data fluency and can influence the collection, interpretation and visualization of that data for leaders and other team members across the organization.
Data and Flow Conversations
If you are striving for a data-driven culture, you also need to have an ongoing way for your team members to regularly meet and talk about the data of the organization. Data isn’t stagnant, so there need to be ways to revise, discuss and build thought leadership about how your organization is evolving when it comes to your data strategy.
Ideas for creating constant conversations around your data and its flow is to:
These are some of the ways that you can create a constant evolving conversation around your data and its flow inside your organization.
Unified View of Data
Often times, how data from various departments as well as outside inputs becomes lost in how it interacts with each other and how it is matched. You want one view of your customer, for instance, as an example, not having to go to different tools for access to various data.
Somewhere all the data needs to connect and there needs to be a documented roadmap of how that data is connected to the various sources. This type of documentation needs to be revised on a regular basis so that you always ensure that you have connected data and you aren’t losing pieces of information because of changes in one tool or department.
A caution should be taken when connecting various data sources to ensure that only data that is needed for business decisions has a unified view. If you over connect data, your view will become challenging to gain any insights that will be relevant for solving business challenges.
Before you connect data ask:
Closing
These are just some of the three main steps you can take to creating a more data-driven culture.
For these tips and more, please watch our recorded webinar on Building a Data-Driven Culture.
Understand how a data-driven culture operates, and how that impacts the different levels in the organization. Data-driven means different things at different levels in the organization and in this article we will help you see those differences.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits and challenges of having a data-driven culture. You may wonder, if we are for companies having a data-driven culture, why would we bring up the challenges? Well, we believe that there are pros and cons to every strategy. While we wholeheartedly have faith in having a data-driven culture as the right move for companies trying to make a difference and impact revenue, we also want all companies to make that choice with all of the information they can.