How to Become a Data-Driven Company
With so much untapped data within arm’s reach of your organization, it’d be wasteful not to make the most of it.
While relying on in-house or outsourced data scientists to provide useful guidance has certainly been proven to accelerate business development, there is a better way.
Imagine if every single one of your employees was equipped to access (and understand) a range of relevant informative insights, using them to complete their job more effectively.
Wouldn’t that be the dream?
Luckily, even though becoming a data-driven company isn’t easy – it’s certainly not impossible. Through hard work, determination, and the help of useful digital tools, your business is just moments away from an unparalleled competitive advantage.
Table of Contents
What is a Data-Driven Company?
A data-driven company is an organization that has integrated intelligent and strategic analysis of information into its day-to-day business operations.
Rather than relying on “luck” to connect with their audience, adapt to the market, and improve their value-chain; data-driven companies are able to effectively use in-depth insights to make informed decisions that fuel ROI, growth, and business success.
What are Some Common Sources of Company Data?
In today’s digital world, businesses are up to their necks in data. You just need to know where to look.
From CRM systems to HR software, you’re likely surrounded by useful software that generates analytical insights that could help you better understand your organization.
Truly.
Almost every SaaS platform that your company uses likely has some form of data you can track – including performance reviews, progress reports, sales metrics, and customer behavior models.
Why is it Important For Companies to Become Data-Driven?
Today’s industries are always evolving.
This creates a risky and unstable marketplace for businesses to operate in, forcing them to constantly make organization-changing decisions in order to keep up.
If a firm wants to survive (and be competitive), agility and adaptability have become crucial. Both of these can be gained by becoming a data-driven company, where employees complete their job perfectly and make accurate and informed choices.
How Do You Become A Data-Driven Company?
It seems practical, then, to introduce data skills to every employee in your workforce and become a data-driven company. How?
1. Offer Data Analytics Training
Across the world, digital skills are in short availability.
Even if you have specific team members who are already able to understand data, every data-driven company would benefit from offering training to their employees.
As a result, you’ll be able to enhance their learning and development journey, equipping your team with the knowledge required to successfully complete their role and advance up the career ladder.
Start to look at eLearning courses online or, if you have the resources internally, design informative tutorials for your staff.
2. Provide Access to a Flow of High-Quality Data
Once your team are developing their analytics capabilities, you need to ensure they can access high-quality, regularly-updated data.
For example, a marketing team should be able to look at their CRM system and explore email open rates, website bounce rates, social media traffic, customer engagement, and more on any given day.
Then, because they’ll have been trained to understand these different insights, they would start to cater their strategy accordingly and deliver more leads to your sales team.
3. Blend Data Streams to Create Valuable Insights
Data is incredible. It’s everywhere (and can be a little overwhelming).
When your employees have access to multiple channels that provide insights, you might benefit from onboarding Data Management – which blends statistics into one digestible platform.
As such, your team doesn’t have to spend hours logging into each software and transferring information into one spreadsheet. Instead, this would be automated for their convenience, helping you become a data-driven company.
What’s more? Your Artificial Intelligence would be able to identify patterns and trends that’d be useful to your team, flagging them up to be used.
4. Utilize the Insights to Make Informed Decisions
With their training, employees would be confident to look at the data available, recognize what it means, and use it to their advantage.
From the smallest decisions in your organization to the largest, you’ll start to see more effective choices being made that result in less wastage – securing your bottom line and guaranteeing a competitive advantage in your market.
5. Repeat the Process Again
Once you have a system in place to collect and generate data across your organization, you’ll be able to measure employee performance and understand where you can provide more support.
In the instance where some members of your team aren’t as proficient in using insights as you’d like, you can bring them back to “Step 1”, providing more training before repeating the cycle again.
Then, when you have a new employee that needs to be part of your data-driven company, you’ll already have the process in place to onboard them and uplevel their skills to your requirements.
How to Become a Data-Driven Company – FAQs
As you can see, becoming a data-driven company isn’t just about hiring a team of analysts. Wouldn’t that be easy?
It involves in-depth employee training across your entire organization. Staff members at all levels to be educated about the importance of data and choose to actively seek it out in order to efficiently complete their day-to-day jobs.
If you have more questions, perhaps these FAQs can help.
- What is a data-driven company culture?
It’s a social movement you can use to embed statistical analysis into all elements of your workforce. Ideally, you’d train employees to use data to their advantage and always look to recruit additional digital skills.
- What are the benefits of becoming a data-driven company?
When data is effectively used across your entire organization, you significantly reduce the element of risk within your company. By providing your team with in-depth insight into your market and customers, they can make accurate decisions.
- Why is it so hard to become a data-driven company?
Data proficiency has a steep learning curve, that often requires a lot of time and attention. Overburdened employees are often unwilling to learn new information and will likely reject organizational change – making your job difficult.
Become a Data-Driven Company with Userlane’s Digital Adoption Platforms
Do you want to become a company that’s driven by data?
First, you need to equip your employees with the ability to access and understand a range of analytical dashboards.
Why? So they can withdraw useful statistics and use them to their advantage – without having to rely on your busy intelligence team.
Userlane’s Digital Adoption Platforms are designed to provide automated software onboarding to your team and reduce the time it takes for them to be proficient in a new skill.
By providing real-time guidance that’s relevant to every individual at their stage of the learning journey, you can easily introduce and inform your staff members to effectively utilize data.
Request a demonstration today.
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