As organizations aspire to become more data-driven, many still struggle to combine their data assets with analytics to improve their business outcomes.
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As organizations aspire to become more data-driven, many still struggle to combine their data assets with analytics to improve their business outcomes. By embracing analytics, your business will be able to better identify new products, determine how to better serve customers and improve operations.
10) You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Before trying to improve business outcomes, you need to associate them with key performance indicators (KPIs). These can be different, such as gross margin, revenue on advertising spent, or blog views.
9) Data, data, data. This is crucial for calculating your KPIs and gaining additional insights into how your business is operating. Make the effort to catalog and classify your data sources. These could be internal such as your online sales software or external data sources you might have access to.
8) Start with baby steps. Link your KPIs to your data sources and prioritize them. Start with the top three or five priorities, depending on your bandwidth and resources. As you complete these and gain more experience, move on to the others.
7) Dig deeper. As you monitor your KPIs, you will notice the changes. Hopefully, trends are moving in a positive direction, but sometimes they are negative. Analyze why. Find the root cause(s) to better understand what is driving these results.
6) Be ready to take action. As you discover root causes hindering your performance, you will need to tackle them. On the flip side, as you discover behaviors helping you improve, consider expanding them to other departments and/or lines of businesses.
5) Leverage technology. The data and analytics technology market can be very complicated and expensive. However, there is a solution for almost every need and budget. LinkedIn is full of groups where experienced professionals share feedback.
4) Don’t reinvent the wheel. If your information-technology team is small or other priorities are taking up their time, explore vendors packaging platforms and services removing complexity.
3) Look for win-win proposals. Partner with the universities in your area for internships and semester projects. Data and analytics is a hot topic in today’s market, and there are a lot of students out there looking for the opportunities.
2) Rinse and repeat. As your business grows and changes, remember to re-visit this list and repeat the required steps to adopt, change and evolve. Add more data sources, track additional KPIs, etc.
1) Invest back into your data & analytics program. As you mature in your journey of becoming a data-driven organization, remember to invest back in order to stay up-to-date and become more efficient.
