🔒101: Leveraging Data

A new year is a great time to sharpen your company’s data expertise and widen opportunities to put it to use for your company. Is your organization doing all it can to succeed? Data can be used to find new clients, hike customer retention, improve service, laser-focus marketing efforts, predict trends, and more. Here are three ways you can enhance your company by leveraging data.

Build a data-driven organization, says Emanuel Younanzadeh at Forbes. In other words, the real work can sometimes lie in forming the culture and mindsets around data. He suggests adding a chief digital officer to your team who sees things in a broader sense and understands diverse ways your company can leverage data. Empowering innovation must be put into play. “Employees should feel comfortable trying new things or sharing their opinions,” he says. “This helps ensure that clever ideas surface and helps keep the organization competitive.”

Make data literacy a team sport, not a siloed talent pool. All departments should be energized when it comes to understanding how data is applied to the business and, yes, leadership, too. “Lack of involvement by leadership and the broader business users is one of the primary reasons data initiatives fail,” say Charter Solutions Senior Analytics Consultants David Lindblom and Mike Richter, at InformationWeek.com.

Take it further in 2022, such as exploring business intelligence software, for tasks like managing inventory, for example, says SmartDataCollective.com. Its supply-chain analysis shows you what stock is on hand, identifying overstock, and alerting you to the opposite scenario as well. “If historical data shows particular sales are increasing or a product has a long lead time from your supplier, you run the risk of understocking these items,” site experts say. “This can lead to problems with fulfilling customer orders.”