Moving the Data-Driven Dial

Data is omnipresent.  It drives everything that we do.  Over the past decade, companies have been moving towards being data-driven with some impressive results, but how did they start?    

With every client interaction, social media campaign, internal process, system event, sale, and even complaint we can build up a picture of what’s happening in our business.  By leveraging technology and techniques to be able to integrate, analyse and most importantly understand data leads business down the path of becoming data-driven. 

Being able to measure, verified, collated data, exposing patterns and analysing facts is the moment actions move away from a hunch and gut feeling and move towards being data-driven.  Basing decisions on data and configuring our key KPI’s so that we can attribute and monitor success and failure accordingly becomes a valuable business tool that takes out the guesswork from business decisions.

Treat data as an asset

Treating the data we hold as an asset that needs to be nurtured and evolved alongside the business provides the foundation for building a reliable platform for analysing and understanding the answers to key defined questions.   

Define the right questions

On its own data is just a series of 1s and 0s.  Endless patterns can and will exist, however, most will not be of little use, or will be obvious.  Defining the right question to understand what the business wants to achieve and then being able to measure those objectives with data is key to building a data-driven strategy that works. 

Focus on the right data

Knowing the business objective and focusing on the right question allows your data team to then narrow down their focus on the most impactful data for answering that question.  You may find that you need to combine information, or that key pieces of information are thrown away or lost in the process, however, all this can be resolved and measured with focus on the right data.  If you are trying to increase your sales funnel, for example, combining Google Analytics traffic activity alongside you Paid Traffic, SEO and Social Media and analysing the data touchpoints and patterns accordingly will help you make the informed decisions about to focus your increase the valuable web site accordingly.

Be mindful of data bias

We all have a bias, that will translate to data bias, and often our biases can seep into our analysis.  Be mindful of how bias can translate into our work and try to work bias out of any understanding of the data to expose maximum data-driven results.  It helps to question ourselves, ask others to review and collaborate to try to drive pure data results rather than those that fit our preconceived views.

Provide a meaningful data story

After analysing key data and answering the business-focused questions, it is important to present this insight in a meaningful, business relatable way.  Ensure that the business can continue to monitor key KPIs to ensure those data-driven decisions are indeed driving the dial the right way. 

Wash, rinse and repeat

Always evolve and reassess your data analysis to ensure that you remain on track and to continue to discover data insights for future decisions.  Even the most successful data-driven decisions will evolve with more information and will change over time.  As your business moves down the data-driven path, ensure that you wash, rinse and repeat the cycle.