Every company creates and stores vast quantities of data every day. We all know that it’s quality and not quantity which counts. You can only expect to see a significant increase in your business success once you learn how to use your data properly as a basis for your decision making (Forrester Report). Learn how to strategically implement your company data to continuously keep you a cut above the competition.
Your Path to a Data-Driven Company
New skills need to be established throughout the company to enable data to be used as a strategic and successful basis for decision making. This will allow you to develop a targeted, systematic approach and establish measurable results. Our many years of experience have shown us: Your data is individual, as should your methodology and the way in which you process data be. Nevertheless, the following approach always forms the basis for this.
Start your data-driven journey with business analytics and set your goals
Start by analyzing which business parameters characterize the success of your business and then check the concrete scenarios. Ask yourself the following question: „How well do my business parameters really describe the commercial goals my company wishes to achieve?“. You can then identify and prioritize the suitable data sources.
Data quality is crucial to overall success of a data-driven strategy
Once you have identified your data sources, then you should check these for quality, stability and availability. Employ metrics to characterize the data quality and describe the robustness of the results. A decisive approach to improve commercial results can be „data quality first“.
Build the foundation for analytic excellence: Automate your harvesting processes
One of the biggest challenges lies in developing a data layer which can be analyzed and continuously maintained and added to. Use tried-and-tested automation approaches to maintain your data and achieve a powerful Data Warehouse. When consolidating data, you need to pay special attention to fixing and filtering out obviously incorrect or incomplete data records.
Merge your structured and unstructured sources into data frames
Use complex business logics, statistics and data integration, and merge your structured and unstructured sources into data frames. This will allow you to use predictive analysis and deep learning to see what will happen in the future simply by analyzing your data.
Drive data consciousness across your organization – maintaining the cycle of knowledge
Your entire organization needs to be aware of how important data is and the significance of data quality. Only then will you be able to achieve a true and sustainable democratization with regard to data. It is imperative that you establish a culture in which all departments within your business understand data, information and details. Data catalogs, glossaries, models and physical data structures help you make existing business parameters, calculation processes and data sources transparent.
Being data-driven requires cultural change
The ability to get the most out of existing data must be ingrained within your company culture. This requires a change process based on a technical, organizational, procedural and cultural level. If you can achieve this, then you will see that a data-driven culture leads to increased requirements, interest and creativity across all levels of your organization. If those within your organization can understand how to analyze data, then this will get the ball rolling. Greater demands with regard to using data will increase target orientation and drastically improve performance throughout the company.
Make data-driven agility your organization’s new core competency
A data-driven agility approach enables responsibility for data-driven business to be delegated right down to an operational level. This allows everyone within the company to be part of a data-driven culture.
How can we support you?
As continuous transformation experts, our strength lies in this holistic approach. From defining and determining business parameters, right the way through to establishing a data-driven agility, we have already been able to prove our abilities for numerous large companies in these 7 steps along the value chain.
Let us work with you in creating a data-driven company. We will work together with you to tailor our methodology and processes to conquer your individual technical, organizational and cultural challenges. Together we can untap the full potential of your data.
Dr. Rainer Lay, Executive Consultant