What it means to be truly ‘data-driven’

More and more businesses are waking up to the potential value of the data they hold, but the next stage in the journey is realising what it means to be truly ‘data-driven’, fueling growth and investment through their data insights. Interestingly, a recent report from Accenture found that data-driven organisations are actually growing at an average of more than thirty percent. Such results are desired by many, some of whom are still struggling to deliver high-quality data and insights across their entire business.

With greater expectations for businesses to stay relevant in their market and provide their customers with new and unique experiences, data-driven decision making has emerged as a differentiator. Leaders will look to the meteoric rise of tech giants such as Meta (Facebook) and Google and their mastery of vast quantities of data and become accustomed to thinking that ‘the more data, the better.’

The extent to which a company can become ‘data-driven’ is often thought to be tied to its ability to access vast amounts of data and the use of expensive analytics platforms to yield insights for strategic business decisions, but it is also important to have the right culture in place.

One of the biggest challenges to becoming truly data-driven is due to cultural barriers such as people and processes, rather than technological barriers. Having a data-driven culture will more likely lead to a data-driven organisation, but that change must be driven by business leadership.

Another important element to becoming data-driven is achieving data democratization, where anyone that needs access to data in order to perform their role and support the goals of business, can do so unimpeded by organisational barriers or technological silos. Data democratization will help support the change to a data-driven culture.

Although data quantity and speed of analysis is important – quality should also be prioritised. It is easy to fall short when it comes to presenting and utilising accurate data. Data preparation requires some degree of investment in time and work, but it’s hard to get value from your data without it. With so much data to manage and utilise, organisations may feel as if they don’t have time to regroup and truly consider data preparation alongside a data analytics platform. However, taking a break to step back and look at the big picture will help businesses to better understand its importance.

As a result, organisations find the greatest value in their data when it is clean, complete, and free of errors. As a result, it is not just the organisations with the most data and latest technology that win - it’s also the organisations that take the time to be strategic, clean and transform raw data prior to its analysis.