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5 ways to foster data-driven culture

If you stop and think for a second, what does data-driven culture mean? In the world, where every customer wants to have everything personalised and fitted perfectly to their needs, data is inevitable to use. It is a path on which your enterprise is about to embark and takes years, sometimes decades to build.

Some people say that data - culture is a decision culture. It’s important to stay true to yourself and say how you define data culture. Is it just quantities of data flowing around your company or does it have its own data strategy and structure? With data it’s more about the quality than quantity. Insights and innovation come hand in hand with data so you must be prepared to iterate the product or service you developed.

Data-culture must come from the company executives who give encouragement. Oftentimes, they do not clearly understand the difference between reporting and advanced analytics (using machine learning and predictive models) and then fail to get traction. Data is much more than just csv files. If you don’t have a solid data foundation, you can’t use data at all. In creating a data-culture, it is crucial to define roles and find the right talent for it. Hire people outside the scope to learn from them.

Source: McKinsey, 2018

Building and fostering a data-driven culture

  • Invest in your people. Make your data employees a part of the idea creation and simply just part of the business. They should fully understand what’s behind a decision so they get the idea of how their work contributes to the overall company performance and helps deliver better insights. It’s not just about the “good” things but sharing the challenges you are facing is an important aspect of building a data-driven culture.
  • Slowly build a data community. The most important aspect of any work environment is a functional and thriving data community. Your role may progress, you may collaborate with people from other departments and data empathy is very much present in this case too. Focus on the talent rather than on the role. Data analysts can explore more from data visualization or work on their presentation skills. The data culture will improve once it’s an open community where people can immerse themselves in the data literacy and the love for data.
  • Invest in a self-service data platform. Having all the data in the world does not mean it is useful to make business decisions and drive purposeful insights. Do you have a team of people dedicated to data analysis, statistics or data visualization? Invest in employee training and make a deep research on the best data tool out there. Train employees on how to use the data platform, let them experiment and discover new insights. BinarBase is a new data intelligence tool that lets you instantly explore hidden insights from your data. Choose your data source, add it to BinarBase and make strategic decisions fast. Be careful not to omit the social aspect of the self-service data platforms. Investment into it will never pay off if you only focus on one thing. Data belongs to everyone, not just IT guys, data analysts or your boss.                              
  • Top down communication. Successful businesses thrive because the information travels from senior leaders down to employees. Everyone must be on the same page to prevent misinformation and bias. Moreover, it helps to increase employee engagement as they feel more heard and align more teams so that everyone works towards a common goal. Embrace inclusivity and never try to communicate ideas more technically than you should to colleagues from other departments. 
  • Establish a single source of truth. You have to make sure that everyone in your organization is aligned with the company goals and vision. You can’t leave them to say their own truth - it creates confusion and uncertainty. Executives often picture that everyone is on the same boat but that cannot be further from the truth. Approach it differently and identify the pain points that are communicated differently to make a change.

Building and fostering a data-driven culture is a long process that sparks change for many enterprises. They are said to perform better, exceed their business goals than those who do not have a data-driven focus in the first place. Culture cannot be changed in a week, it requires direct internal communication, support from the top management and the best data integration platform to connect business goals with data.

If you are curious to know more about it, please be sure to check out our Binarbase data intelligence tool at: www.binarbase.com

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