Data Culture—The Path to Success?
What is a data-driven corporate culture, why should you adopt it, and what are the challenges?
When it comes to business intelligence, the term “data culture” is often mentioned, as companies are facing a major transformation. To improve decisions, processes, products, and services, they need to make full use of their data. For a long time, this required hiring an IT department or specialized data analysts. With modern BI software, however, all employees can analyze data and gain important insights from it. For this to become a new habit among employees, though, the corporate culture must evolve into a data-driven culture.
What is a data culture?
The term “data culture” can be defined in various ways. It generally refers to all the norms, mindsets, and behaviors within an organization that encourage employees to regularly stay informed about data, analyze it, and make data-driven decisions. Data is thus used on a broad scale and not just by a select few employees.
The following factors shape a data-driven culture:
- Data is treated as a vital resource by all employees across various departments of a company, and it is handled with trust and integrity
- Every employee understands what is intended to be achieved with the data and its analysis
- Decisions should be based on data and analysis, not on opinions or gut feelings
- Decisions are made efficiently and effectively based on the data
- Reliable data is provided and documented at all times
Goals of a Data Culture
The goal of a data culture is therefore to empower and encourage all employees to actively use data to make their daily work easier, make decisions, and thereby fully realize the company’s potential. This optimizes decision-making, improves actions, and creates competitive advantages.
Why is a data culture important?
As a recent survey by BARC shows (About the BARC Data Culture Survey), the greatest benefits of a data culture are improved decision-making, process improvements, and cost reductions. However, a successful data culture also helps increase revenue, foster greater acceptance of decisions, and create competitive advantages. At the same time, the study also showed that a data culture is an essential component of modern corporate culture and can thus attract talented employees or encourage them to stay. What begins as a strategic decision to improve competitiveness can therefore also make an important contribution to recruitment.
As the study showed, finance departments (62 percent) and sales (42 percent) are often the departments within a company that are most data-driven and make decisions based on data. But data-driven decisions can also help a company move forward in areas such as marketing, logistics, and production.
Challenges in building a data culture
Despite the many benefits of a strong data culture, it is not that easy for a company to become data-driven. Companies seeking to establish a data culture face various challenges:
1. Data democratisation
In the past, data fell under the purview of IT staff, data scientists, and analysts. However, if data-driven decisions are to be made company-wide, employees must have access to all data relevant to their decisions and must be able to perform their own analyses.
Furthermore, employees are often completely unaware of what data already exists within a company—especially if it has been stored in isolated silos until now. Therefore, it is important not only to give employees access to this data but also to raise their awareness of what data is already available.
2. Data literacy
If a data culture is to be established, employees often first need to learn how to correctly interpret, create, analyze, and communicate data. Comprehensive training, as well as support and encouragement from managers, are essential for this. Intuitive business intelligence software with self-service BI and smart dashboards can also help employees interpret data and share their insights—for example, by presenting the data in charts.
3. Data Governance
At the top of the list of concerns for many data users is often data reliability—or data quality—because inaccurate data leads to incorrect decisions. That is why data governance policies are important—policies that, for example, define who is responsible for data or how quality control and improvement are carried out. This way, employees can be confident that the data they use is consistent, complete, valid, accurate, and up-to-date.
4. Data security and privacy
When managing data, its security and protection are a top priority—especially in the context of data protection laws such as the GDPR. If a data-driven corporate culture is to be established, companies must therefore strike a balance between data protection and making as much data as possible available to their employees. In particular, when data is stored in the cloud or is to be made available to employees working remotely, companies must implement data security policies.
Conclusion
A data-driven corporate culture is a key success factor for modern companies. However, there are several challenges involved in establishing a data culture that must be taken into account. Well-designed BI software can not only provide your employees with convenient access to all data and help them analyze it, but it also supports you in the areas of data governance, data security, and data protection.
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