Fostering A Data Driven Culture: How An Enterprise Can Drive Innovation & Be Adaptive?

In the digital world, access to reliable, clean data is no longer ‘good-to-have’ but imperative. The rapid pace of modern tech and innovation in data storage, processing, business intelligence (BI) and analytics is enabling enterprises to be analytics-ready. Enterprises deal with an abundance of data derived from business transactions, customer interaction, and cross-departmental collaboration. This data when utilized effectively can deliver insights into various aspects of business, driving material outcomes to gain a competitive edge.

For example, an automobile company relies on competition, consumers, market and financial data to determine which new technology and features should be added to the next-generation cars. The healthcare organizations rely on patients and latest technological advancements in medical sciences to define standardized materials and surgical equipment for the operating rooms. Likewise, the hospitality industry consumes data from marketing teams and consumer behavior to offer personalized services and experiences to customers.

In each of these scenarios, insights from the gathered data help to increase sales, improve patient care and customer service and reduce operational expenditure. Altogether, these insights challenge your status quo to drive real, actionable outcomes and innovation leaving a positive impact on businesses and people’s lives.

But reaching this point of inflection requires enterprises to commit to redefining their business processes and creating a data driven culture. A culture that requires a foundational transformation in the way people think and operate, change in infrastructure, and the entire relationship between employees and technology specialists. It must take hold when the organization establishes three important goals: break down silos, empower teams to explore data, and engage teams via leadership.

1. Break Down Data Silos:
   In order to break down data silos, the enterprise must transition from isolated data platforms that support a specific business unit or a role to centralized platforms having multi-user access. This technological shift should coordinate with the modern cross-department, design-thinking collaboration strategies.
   Instead of having your teams maintain their own work styles and focus on discreet projects, form a diverse team of individuals from different departments and backgrounds to share expertise and knowledge. Ensure the knowledge held in the data and with people in your organization is communicated across the company. Valuable data such as customer purchase histories and demographics are also useful for departments other than sales and marketing. They can manipulate and test marketing or operations data to fulfill unique purposes.
2. Empower Teams To Work Together and Explore Data:
   Once the data is free from silos, employees working in different groups like marketing, supply chain and finance will have first-hand knowledge of all major business processes. Their experience of dealing with complex problems and technologies will make them the best resource to engage with the data and push it towards driving better outcomes.
   But the teams dealing with comprehensive data need a centralized analytics tool that allows them to engage with the data. The platform should enable assigned access levels and role-based security that keeps the data driven culture within the defined governance established by the IT professionals. Development of such centralized platform is possible by embracing application modernization. This modern-day approach is faster than the previous models which eliminate the manual ways of querying data to IT for generating reports. It also enables a non-expert query and maniplates data and visulizes the results instantly.
3. Separate Data Driven Culture From A Traditional Business Model:
   In the data driven enterprise, managers must encourage their employees to interact with the data. Employees will have the freedom to take quick actions, review and respond to the outcomes which are not necessarily positive. It is important for the team to feed data into the models and implement an iterative process so that the business outcomes and decisions are improved each time.
   Thereafter, the data driven managers rely on dashboards to perform day-to-day activities and share the data behind business’s decisions and results, providing complete transparency around the changes in the business.

A data driven culture can open doors to new opportunities for your business – from entering into new markets to creating new business models around untapped existing resources/assets and pursuing a demographic you always wanted to. The teams can manipulate the data through the central platform by testing and iterating it and always pouring back the learnings into the business. This not only helps your business be more empathetic but also understand the customer needs as the data manifests itself in unexpected ways. Rishabh Software helps enterprises leverage best-of-breed tools and methodologies to re-platform legacy applications through application modernization services.