Part 1: The Potential, Problem and Pressures With Data

A Key Indicator of Success

In today’s world, one of the key indicators of those who win in business are those who use their data to their strategic advantage by finding valuable insights that lead to actionable data-driven decisions.

Companies who efficiently collect, curate and leverage data to guide business strategy and execution perform better than companies who rely on intuition. These companies excel in their industry, increase revenue, grow their organizations and strengthen customer relationships.

Simply put: when you thrive with data, you’ll succeed in business.

More Data, More Problems

Here’s the problem: less than 5% of data collected is ever analyzed. 

There is an immense amount of data available today, but very few companies harness that data to drive their business forward. While most companies understand that they should use their data as an asset, they struggle to make sense of it all. It’s a tension felt throughout the entire organization.

–  The technical side of the company faces pressures to properly manage this immense volume of data and provide the best solutions to equip their company with analytic tools and capabilities.

They are responsible for keeping data clean and clear, ensuring it stays high quality and trustworthy. They need to keep data governed so it is secure and centralized, yet accessible to end users. Then, in addition to trying to manage all of this, they are often tasked with providing the right solutions or reports that empower business users to access data, find insights and take action.

–  The business side of the company faces pressures to quickly make sense of the immense volume of data and turn it into appropriate insights that will provide guidance or credibility to their decisions. They tend to feel the tension to make data-driven decisions increase without proper resources to support them.

If there is not a centralized, accessible system for managing the organization’s data, users will run into data prep challenges like manually pulling data from various sources to cobble together basic reports. This is a labor intensive and inefficient practice which results in wasted time throughout the organization. They waste hours each month replicating their same report or duplicating efforts already happening in other areas of the company.

Besides the data preparation and report challenges, end-users also face pressures of making data-driven decisions without being equipped to do analysis that will provide more than surface level insights.

–  The organization’s leaders or executives face pressures to provide a vision and strategic roadmap that incorporates a plan for the immense volume of data and maximizes their analytic investments. There are constantly new solutions developed in the industry and therefore a lot of external sales messaging that can be confusing and distract a leader’s focus.

Leaders feel the tension of providing strategic plans that maximize their analytic investments to keep their organization competitive, or sometimes just relevant, yet not be swayed by the analytic marketplace messaging.

So what can you do (and should you do) to thrive with data rather than drown in it?

We’ll give you a hint: It’s all about growing in maturity.
Continue reading in the series: