What makes an organisation stand out and lead today's economy lies in the way they use their data. It is a fact that we are sitting on endless streams of valuable insights but we are unable to process them all. Some of us are doing better than others in leveraging advanced technologies to get the needed information while others are still struggling with the basics.
Organisational culture can increase the success rate of analytic application, speed up the adoption and guide the company away from technological pitfalls.
Seven principles that underpin a healthy data culture
The question is: how do you establish a culture that embraces data. You can't force it but doing nothing is not the answer either. According to McKinsey, there are seven principles you should take into account.
1. Quality data helps you make better decisionsData will never stop streaming in. However you capture and use your data, it should be serving one goal only: to make better and faster decisions. To make sense out of it all, you need to first look at the landscape of data, the type of analytics and the insights you want to extract. Once you have narrowed down your path, act upon it quickly to improve on the quality of your services and products, or deliver it to your customer or your team.
Also look at the places, functions that tend to make key critical decisions and examining how they collect, analyse and use the insights to draw conclusions. Through such processes, you should be able to tell how viable the current data is, whether the current analytics/ data processing system is working, and how much time is needed for the function to make a decision.
2. Getting the C-suite onboard with your plan
The Board of Directors possesses not only valuable insights about what's going on internally, but they can also share key trends and news which we may not be aware of. Having frequent discussion and knowledge sharing sessions with senior management is an integral part of the data culture.
Nevertheless, you cannot build a healthy culture without transparency. In order to gain a complete transparency across the organisation, it must be encouraged and promoted on every level. The more the senior management and the project manager being transparent about their progress, the more good ideas can be generated, and the bad ones are kept at bay.
Read more: Rise of Chief Data Officer (CDO) to Solve the Data Issues
3. Give the employees access to dataTo make people believe in data, they first need to have the data in their hand. Senior management being transparent about their information does not have any meaning if your employees cannot access them. Thus, it is essential to build a platform for your employees to access relevant data anytime they want without constraints.
The platform also promotes the data to flow through every corner of the organisation. Data is not only essential for the leaders and managers, it is also wanted everywhere else. Giving the employees the right data empowers them to change their behaviours. Once the behaviours change, everything else starts to fall into place.
Subscribe to TRG Blog and stay tuned to part 2 of this series to read the remaining of factors leaders need to watch out for when building a healthy data culture.
