There is a lot of talk going around about “Data” and being “Data-Driven,” and businesses have been investing heavily in Data and AI for the past few years. The big data industry is expected to grow to $77 billion by the year 2023. Currently, only 26% of companies in the world have actually built a data-driven culture.
Even with the steady rise of organizations realizing the importance of data insights, they are still finding it difficult to not just understand and create value from the data insights but also how to make it actionable.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Data insights are one of the most valuable assets for your organization. It is vital for CEOs and other senior executives to focus on both measuring and capitalizing on data-driven insights and making it actionable.
How to create insights from your data?
Companies see a lot of data influx through the amount of data they collect and handling such big volumes of data can become overwhelming to integrate and analyze. Here, CEOs and business leaders need to understand that being a data-driven company demands time, focus and commitment and requires emphasizing the importance and management of data insights at every level of the organization.
✔️ Starting Quick: Organizations can start by planning out short-term goals based on critical business instances or demands, starting quick and measuring its results. This would validate your investment be it resources or time and help you identify other significant instances. This is the best way to measure a strategy’s effectiveness as it can pave the road for future data investments.
📊 Focusing on key indicators: Defining key indicators related to business goals and then tracking them is important for achieving proposed data objectives. This would help companies to not just measure their growth but also allow them to make required changes to their plan of action.
💡Understanding the importance of appropriate data: A company can collect lots of data and the desire to acquire more insights can be appealing. Drawing analysis and extracting valuable insights from such big data can become quite tricky as well as addicting, however, it can easily negate the idea of starting quick and achieving small wins.
🔎Staying Focused: Becoming a data-driven company demands being consistent and focused over a long period of time. As a part of this journey, it is vital to remain focused on what you are trying to achieve and zero in on the indicators and insights that are productive for your business.
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How to make your data actionable?
You can gather lots of insights from your data, however, not all of them can turn actionable. In fact, consistency is the key when it comes to making use of the actionable insights from your data.
So, how do you decide which insights are useful and which are not? For this, you need to ask some questions to really start making sense of the insights you have derived.
Questions to ask yourself
🗸 What outcomes do you want to achieve?
🗸 What insights are you trying to uncover?
🗸 What will be the source of the Data?
🗸 Who will be using the insights?
Setting objectives and outcomes beforehand is a smarter way to yield efficient and effective results. For example, knowing what you want to achieve from your company’s finance system and establishing certain metrics to measure, can help you determine its success. Your expected insights and outcomes need to be precisely aligned with your business goals. Also, it is crucial to emphasize more on the data’s source i.e., where the data is coming from and whether the source is credible or not. Imagine collecting unauthentic data and then drawing insights from them. Sounds like a nightmare, right?
Figuring out what insights to uncover should be backed by proper knowledge of the data’s userbase. You should know who your end user is going to be – is it a business leader, a functional leader, or a team leader? Depending on the end-user, your outcome goals will be different which in turn may change the insights as well as the data that you draw from.
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Where to start your data journey?
Data is important for your business. For it to work for you (and not the other way around), it needs to be part of your overall business and technology strategy. So, where to start?
ProServeIT created a technology strategy framework for CEOs to help you visualize and have a balanced approach to your technology requirements. This identifies any gaps between your business objectives and current technology capabilities. This ultimately results in your technology acting as your business enabler. The absence of a Technology Strategy Framework can lead to overspend on technologies, redundancy, and inefficiency. It is a smart business decision to invest in a technology roadmap that would support achieving and aligning your goals and objectives.
Data and insights are the roof of the technology strategy framework – which we call “The Technology House”. Rather than taking a siloed approach to data, we recommend looking at your entire technology landscape with this structured and visualized framework.
This approach will help you avoid scattered data and will efficiently bring about actionable insights from your data.
Book a complimentary consultation to start your technology roadmap. With ProServeIT’s technology roadmap Lite for CEOs, you will get a customized Technology Strategy Framework and assessment for your organization. Our assessment includes recommendations to improve your technology framework, suggested timelines and investment requirements for each recommendation.
