4. Data culture
- Is created by continuous TRAINING and guidance
- This is not a technological step but rather a cultural shift
- Not a magic trick, more of a martial art
- If only management understands the data, it is not enough! People at execution need to be able to gain intelligence from it
- System of regular meetings with executives where we ask the following questions:
- What are the planned activities for the upcoming period?
- What changes in data are we expecting from these activities?
- And when the next meeting comes, we review
- If the activity has taken place
- If yes, then if the expected change in data has taken place. If not, we look for reasons why that is the case
- Goal of this step is to learn to manage activities based on the data presented by our reporting system
- We now have tailored, automatic reporting system and our people know how to use it. But it is not enough. Our data is gathered, integrated and reported automatically. But the final activity still lies on the shoulders of people. And as all people, they fall into the traps of human condition. They have different priorities, get sick, tired or leave the organisation altogether. Most notably, they have limited capacity. Time for the final step in the data drak iven journey
Manual data inputs, need to request data from IT. Single question is answered once. To answer the same question in the future, whole process from data collection to analysis has to repeat. Slow, tedious and often off target.
Departments have data collection and visualisation systems in place. Marketing looks into Google analytics, product management watches CRM and accounting evaluates it all in SAP. Step forward, but no accessible single source of truth exists. If someone asks “what was our revenue after tax yesterday?”, each department might answer something different.
Connection of department data into one integrated data warehouse. On this integrated dataset, custom business intelligence reporting systems are developed. Reporting is both tailored for the needs of each department as well as captures a single source of truth on results of the whole company.
When we have sharp reporting, but our people do not get smarter from it, we are far behind its potential. Here we train and mentor our clients in order to establish firm understanding of practical work with data and how to base both managerial and executive decisions on it. Not a technical step but rather a cultural one, it takes time and discipline but the fruits of this work become evident quite soon. But still, activity is done by human which brings a whole lot of issues with it.
For activities which are high value, manual work intensive and scalable we find ways for their automatization. Thus we reach the final step of becoming data-driven. We eliminate the human actor from the process and let the data run the show. Instead of the automated tasks people can busy themselves with tasks which bring additional value. Or they can just take it easy and clock out earlier. We let you decide on that.