The businesses today have a large amount of data; way more than they would have had about two decades ago. This data is accumulated from numerous sources which include interactions with customers and the behavior exhibited by the staff.
This data being collected contains a lot of valuable information for the company. How to maximize its use is the question. This information should be used to optimize fully on the goals of the business as well as investigating potential possibilities. This will of course mean carrying out research and tests to ensure that you are selling the most from your present service or product.
The nature of the tests can vary. A simple thing like placing a product at the wrong shelf in a produce aisle could make the difference between over the roof sales or a product going bad on the shelf. The tests could also evaluate the effectiveness of using a certain word in an SEO to maximize traffic on your webpage. All of this is Data centered.
Other than for research, data can be used as reference material especially when trying to make recommendations to ensure customer satisfaction based on history or on suggestions. It also can help the company and the management review their statistics make their best changes.
To become a data driven business can seem quite tedious especially when you consider the crowded market offering to unlock the power of your data. Every company has their different resources and goals. They do however require assistance in creating a data driven approach to business. Here are four fundamental supports required.
Appropriate Infrastructure for the company goals
If there is a lacking data infrastructure then it is safe to say that there will be lacking reliable sources of data. This infrastructure collects, stores, transmits, and delivers the data that will be used during monitoring and evaluation to assist in understanding opportunities.
The data infrastructure solutions vary with the various corporations and it is basically a balancing act between the expense of data collection and wielding and the business goals benefit.
For instance, if we compare a gaming company and a winery; the gaming Co. would want the data on how it’s users plays the games in order for them to enhance the user experience and enlarge their numbers while a winery would focus on the products that are being bought by the customers more.
The point being that, for data infrastructure investment, set specific goals and approach it with those goals in mind but be sure to leave room for flexibility because when the company grows so will its goals and ultimately its data infrastructure.
Democratize Data Throughout the Company
The data infrastructure investments are most valuable when the data attained is accessible. This is access enables people to monitor and evaluate the business and measure the performance in general.
When given this forum, not only are employees enlightened but it enables them to get in touch with the company and its goals and they can make recommendations and improvements in the areas they see lacking as per the data they have. It also shows them whether their targets are being attained or not. Which, overall does boost the company productivity.
Enable Experimentation
Before making high bid investments, it is important to provide tools for experimenting as they will give the ability to evaluate innovations and treatments and give educative information. One of the most common and highly effective evaluation methods is the before and after type which gives feedback on the change affecting the test object.
There are other methods of evaluation and experimentation. Some are more preferred by companies because of their complexity. It is important to note that the best systems of experimentation will streamline the creations and follow-up of test groups, their treatments and the results which would ease the procedure and scale it throughout the organization. A careful experiment design would guarantee maximization of opportunity for genuine learning and this would be by a well-designed testing platform.
Fostering a Data Driven Culture
A data driven business culture entails the use of data to maximize familiar processes as well as a whole company philosophy with regards to experimentation and innovation. A forum where staff seek opportunity for the breakthrough feature or products.
This culture can be fostered by consulting when making decisions especially by the top-level employees and management and more importantly requiring figures and statistics to back up the claims. A question that would assist this is; “What do the numbers Show?” Frequent use of this statistics and reference to the ‘numbers’ will encourage the employees to refer to the data more often and thus optimize the data infrastructure.
The above laid out tools in conjunction with the company’s goals and vision would give a company the boost it needed. Emphasis should be placed in developing a data-driven business culture. The companies already employing these data culture have a better competitive advantage and are already reporting better results and they have the numbers to prove it.
