Why data culture matters

BUILDING A COMPLETE, end-to-end platform that enables diverse data sets, analytics, and insights to be accessed by employees whenever, and wherever they are, is now crucial to organisations success and their competitive endeavour.

But more importantly in my mind, is driving the philosophy or culture of Data within an organisation such that putting data at the heart of operational thinking and decision-making becomes the pivotal aspect to get right first.

Research undertaken by IDC concluded that if an organisation could manage their diverse data sets, apply new analytics over this data, make this available to more people and ultimately do this at speed, then organisations can unlock what IDC deemed their Data Dividend.

In the UK alone, this Data Dividend equated to some £53 Billion more in business value than those that lag behind.

With the increasing variety and velocity of data growing on a daily basis, data specialists are under increasing pressure from the business to deliver instant and usable insight to gain a competitive advantage for their organisation. Managing the complexities of their corporate data landscape to enable high performing data solutions that unlock insights and deliver measurable ROI for their organisations becomes a board level discussion.

But the focus should not be on just hiring Data Scientists and thinking you have then solved the problem. Before this, you need to understand the questions you want to ask. Driving a data culture starts with understanding the questions you need to ask. Normally very simple questions such as “which of my customers are the most profitable?”, “what is my optimum stock level for this item?”. These seemingly simple business questions force us to uncover, collate, define and manage sets of data both internal and external to our organisations to build the picture.

Again having the data is good start, and organisations and the industry have spent decades bringing data silos together to give that one version of the truth, in many cases creating a new silo and with the business moving at speed, it still fails to provide the right answer, in the right timeframe, in many cases. We need a cultural shift. We need every employee asking questions, being inquisitive and pushing for insight from data to support their decision making. In some cases that decision making should just be taken care of, by the machine, where it has the same or better chance of making the right decision based on the full set of information available. The future of high performing organisations will have both human and machine decision making working together in a highly productive symbiosis.

Moving towards this culture is not an easy task, making data available to all where once it was protected by few, putting data and insight first for every business decision and enabling this at the speed of business today is a journey.

A journey always starts with a first step and organisations looking to thrive in this new data world order, need to start that journey soon, by focussing on some key areas.
Start with the Business Questions - Understand the key questions you need to ask, focus on a few key questions first.
Understand your data estate - You need to understand what data you have and importantly what data you don’t have to answer those key business questions.

Build a modern data platform - What are the tools for building a data platform? Evaluate new approaches to connecting your business and driving operational efficiencies. Analytics, IoT and the cloud will play a pivotal role in reinventing your value chain by transforming from ageing systems to a connected, dynamic platform.
Drive a data culture.

It’s too profitable not to do so, with the IDC white paper valuing the potential data dividend at an impressive $1.6 trillion worldwide. It’s all about putting data at the heart of operational thinking and decision-making. With access to an ever-expanding volume of data inside the walls of your business and across the web, the potential in data is endless.
Move beyond ‘Big Data’ to ‘All Data’.
Switch the focus from ‘Big Data’ to embrace ‘All Data’ and in this new world, everyone has access and they’re empowered to make decisions.

Look to embed machine intelligence where possible to differentiate.
Ideally, you should be using machine learning and advanced analytics to differentiate, but again do this in the context of the business questions you are looking to answer. Automate these decisions and take action.