When it comes to decision-making, it can be challenging to not follow your first instinct. However, no matter how much experience you’re bringing to the table, when it comes to a business decision, it’s crucial that you tackle everything from a simple web page design to a company-wide initiative with proven at the center.
For any company, from an IT-focused organization to a tech company, you want to be as data-driven as possible. To accomplish this successfully, it’s important to have a top-down approach where management truly understands the importance of being data-driven and making decisions based on these results or patterns. To put it simply, leveraging data and data operations can help to take your company to the next level. Here are a few ways to do so:
Democratize Data
It’s important to ensure that each team member across the organization has seamless access to data that can be consumed to ease their day-to-day roles. If it’s complicated to find and understand, there is a chance that these individuals won’t use it. To ensure it’s easy to access, leaders need to give every employee access to the company’s BI system, and there should be training or onboarding to properly educate and share every dashboard or piece of information that’s available to them to help them be more efficient in their job.
Continuous Maintenance and Expansion of Data Operations
As businesses grow and evolve constantly, data sources, their focus and even the KPIs tracked change as well. As an organization, it’s important that you’re continuously ensuring your teams are aligned with one another. Data is often changing and fluctuating, so the “perfect” dashboard created six months ago, in many cases, may not be relevant anymore and needs to be refreshed or reconstructed.
Accuracy, Accuracy, Accuracy
No data is better than wrong data—yes, you read that correctly. When decision-makers leverage on complete (but wrong) data, it can have negative repercussions that lead the rest of your team to produce a product or analysis that ends up being incorrect or inaccurate. Even if you’re working with a minimal amount of data, the benefit is that you’re aware of the holes that may be missing to complete the report or analysis. Ensuring that the data accuracy is as close as possible to 100% will help to avoid situations where teams may make a wrong decision due to misleading data.
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Set Quantifiable KPIs
Business success can only be measured by numbers. As a general process, it’s recommended to begin each year by setting financial goals for the upcoming year and deciding on the strategic initiatives that will lead you to meet these goals. It’s also very important to meet with every team and define the exact measurable KPIs for almost every employee in the company. The success of the general plan is heavily dependent on every team’s ability to keep up with its KPIs.
As a leader, encourage open communication to help keep teams on track with their goals, as well as helping to course correct when needed, whether they’re exceeding their goals sooner than anticipated or are behind their targets.
Hire Experts to Interpret the Data
Always remember that simply showing the data alone is not always enough. Sometimes people need help with interpreting the meaning of the data. To properly interpret what’s in front of them, leaders should share the initial background of where the data came from and then walk through the process of how the final conclusions came about while being as straightforward as possible.
Once there is data that is presented in a way that is accessible to enough employees, businesses can then generate a discussion about the meaning of these numbers. Once there’re clear examples of using data to understand real-world scenarios, it can help to easily solve tough business questions and encourage all employees to incorporate this type of access into their roles daily.
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