Let data insight guide your every move
Edison
Author
Jan 23, 2021
Let data insight guide your every move
These days, gut instinct is no longer enough if you want to remain competitive. Most organizations realize that data should lie at the heart of their decision-making.
Data is key to any business. And while there is no silver bullet for making data work for your business, it does hold several keys. In this post, we’ll explore the use of data to inform your everyday activity and how it can help you to make better decisions in an ever-evolving industry.
Better decisions lead to better business outcomes. However, many leaders currently struggle with how to utilize data to make informed decisions properly. It is time for executive teams, sales teams, and departmental managers alike to apply Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) techniques to their businesses. A recent survey of top executives revealed that the most valuable resource an organization has is not their money or their people; it’s their data. The challenge lies in having access to this data while also knowing your next move.
We review the data provided by our databases and sales reporting systems but never really take the time to look into it deeply. However, most of them are still made using the “gut” instinct when it comes to big decisions. You need to understand how lousy gut judgments can affect your business.
Instead of turning to dashboards or spreadsheets, businesses often default to the familiar...and flawed...method of aggregating data into a "decision-making gut." Most gut instincts are simply the biases we all harbor in our subconscious. And while they might seem accurate in real-time, we know that this kind of thinking can be misleading in the long term and come with a significant downside. We are hardwired to use this kind of flawed decision-making because it's fast and easy, so most organizations default back to gut instinct time and again.
A recent Gartner survey shows that over 80% of respondents consider data the most crucial factor in driving business results. This is a clear indication that businesses today are aware that data comes before decision-making. So if you have spent years of your life wondering how to make better decisions, it’s time to get your hands dirty!
Data insights are the fuel that powers growth. They give you the correct answers on what content, channels to focus on, which product to build, etc. Without good data insights, you’re just flying blind and making many mistakes.
Businesses have many opportunities for improvement. The problem is that many companies ignore these opportunities because they don’t have data to back them up. Thankfully many companies are now collecting a ton of data that can be used to guide decision-making and improve performance. It’s time for data insight to help you make better decisions, and it begins by understanding big data analytics.
Today's smartest companies use data and analysis to guide their every move in all industries. Marketing teams leverage every nook and cranny of their website traffic reports, social media engagement metrics, customer acquisition costs, etc. They immerse themselves in the numbers and are never afraid to make hard decisions. If you're not using data to make your marketing efforts more effective, you're behind the curve—and leaving money on the table. Data is the key to unlocking business insights that can help your business grow, whether you are a startup or a Fortune 500 company. I'm often asked: What does good data look like? How do you analyze it?
"Are you trying to drown in a sea of information? Can’t tell the signal from the noise?" It’s ok, and I won't judge. We live in an era of big data, with lots of information at our fingertips, all of which we can analyze to produce insights that can improve our businesses. This is great news since we don’t have to do it alone but rather have tools at our disposal that help us make sense of all this data and get to know our audience better to produce great content and cater directly to their needs.
Data insight is knowledge extracted from data that can be used to inform decision-making and drive organizational transformation and innovation. Data insight is the next step beyond data.
Data insight has become an essential concept in data-driven decision-making. With increased uncertainty and complexity, data is needed to reveal what is hidden in the numbers. Data insight translates large amounts of data into meaningful information, which leads to business value, providing clarity where there was previously ambiguity. It is key to corporate innovation and organizational transformation.
Data insight is the gateway to better decision-making and increased organizational performance. The competitive advantage gleaned from effective Data Insight can transform an organization in ways that justify significant investments. Data Insight is a set of tools, processes, and human capital capabilities designed to accelerate the identification, acquisition, and application of substantive insights derived from data. Data Insight enables the enterprise to gain new knowledge from existing data assets and create new data assets for communicating important insights that will predict or catalyze future outcomes.
Data insights can truly revolutionize your business. So why don’t companies take advantage of its power? Sometimes it just boils down to the fact that we aren’t utilizing data to its full potential. In other cases, it can be because we lack a clear way to analyze our data — and make decisions based on what it is telling us. To remedy this problem, we need to know how to turn various information into insights and then move forward with them.
Organizations of all sizes use data analytics tools and technology to obtain actionable data insights—knowledge that can help them anticipate and mitigate risk, boost efficiency and productivity, and increase their likelihood of success. Using these tools, they collect, process, analyze, and visualize their data to generate critical information that helps them understand customers better, optimize internal operations, identify insights that lead to improved methods and profitable growth—and achieve their goals faster than ever before.
Data-driven decision-making (DDDM) is an effective strategy for accelerating business performance by using data to create intelligent business decisions. DDDM can be defined as a process that involves collecting data based on measurable goals or key performance indicators (KPIs), analyzing the facts and patterns from these insights, and using them to develop strategies and activities that will benefit the business in various areas. It emphasizes analysis over intuition, sending practical outputs to appropriately relevant stakeholders. Combining this with data analytics can improve decision-making further by thinking the issues through systematically.
The correct data doesn’t come easy; you need to be able to implement intelligent processes for collecting, analyzing, and verifying data in a way that is both accurate and has zero room for bias. Data needs to be accessible by everyone in your company throughout the decision-making process.
Decision-making in most organizations is a haphazard process that involves spreadsheets, incomplete data, and favoritism. Employees get frustrated with the slow process, and the higher-ups end up with bad decisions because of all the hand-holding involved. Data-driven analytics platforms like AI Surge can solve all of these problems by helping you improve efficiency, give recommendations, correct anomalies, and bolster accuracy while giving your employees more autonomy over their work.