Summary. Being data-driven has been a priority for companies for decades — but many have seen mixed results. Why? According to a new survey of executives, company culture is a harder hurdle to clear than any technical problem. On top of that, the continuing explosion of the amount of data and growing concerns over privacy and data ownership keep making the task harder. The author offers three principles to help companies achieve their goals.Companies have been working to become more data-driven for many years at this point, with mixed results. These efforts play out over time in organizations, and persistence, resilience, execution, and a relentless drive to employ data to make more informed business decisions are what distinguishes those companies that prevail from those who continue to struggle. But while the mission may remain steady, the particulars change.
Right now, the biggest challenge for organizations working on their data strategy might not have to do with technology at all. In the latest NewVantage Partners annual survey, which tracks the progress of corporate data initiatives, corporate chief data, information, and analytics executives reported that cultural change is the most critical business imperative. It’s an understandable problem: to a degree that is perpetually underestimated, becoming data-driven is about the ability of people and organizations to adapt to change. Long-established companies, which have been successful over generations or centuries, are unlikely to change overnight — adoption of the internet through digital transformation efforts has played out over the course of the past quarter century. Similarly, the effort by companies to become data-driven represents a business transformation that is playing out over the course of a generation. Much has been achieved, yet more remains to be done.
But while this issue isn’t new, there are two cultural dynamics that have shaped company efforts during the past few years.
First, the Covid-19 pandemic — and the disruptions it caused — raised awareness of the importance of data, science, and facts. While companies may have paid lip service to the importance of data before, the case that good data is essential to making informed, prudent, and judicious business decisions has been made crystal clear over the past two years.
Second, self-service is on the rise, and individuals now consume information and data when they want and how they want it. We live during a time of increasingly decentralized information, which means that consumers can select the news they follow, the social media they engage with, and the data that they choose to trust, with the consequence that consumers of information can be subjected to selective presentation of data to support a wide range of often diverging viewpoints. At its most extreme, this has given rise to the notion of “alternative facts.”
Finally, there’s a structural fact: the amount of data that is created each day continues to proliferate at exponential rates. With greater computing power, companies can now process massive quantities of data to generate a precise answer, rather than rely on representative data samples.
Understanding these trends — and how other companies are navigating them — can help companies make real progress towards their goals of data-driven decision making.
Barriers to Becoming Data-Driven
There are three indicators of progress…
