Data is a goldmine for companies: The collection, storage and use of data are indispensable for company performance. However, if some data
sources are more visible, others are harder to identify. And, across the volume of data collected, some are key for your business, others not. It is therefore not necessary to exploit all available information, at the risk of losing focus and submerging your teams with information which
is irrelevant to your objectives. In this article, we help you to find and exploit the right (useful) data avoiding pointless indicators (used to create reports which seem to be favourable but which in fact hide a less flattering reality).
What data should be collected?
Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in the volume of available and visible data: Financial, marketing, sales or even human resources data. Easy to extract, display and use, this approach constitutes a first step towards a data culture. However, there exist huge deposits of invisible (or unstructured) data, more difficult to collect and process, which are nevertheless valuable sources.. We think here for example of operational indicators, team messages, production data or even company chat systems … In 2018 these represented 75% of data produced daily*. These are an absolute goldmine to support your activity and decision-making.
Despite a growing understanding of the changes underway, too many companies still ignore the importance of this data and do not exploit them. Even if collected and stored, this data is often difficult to access and therefore infrequently used. In a report published by Alteryx in January 2019, 77 % of people surveyed understand the need to access Big Data. 45% feel they lack information pertinent to their important decisions and 76% agree that adding additional data sources would provide positive
results. Are you still hesitating to focus on data?
However you should not use data just because it is a trend, but because it answers the following questions: What are the strategic objectives of the team? How to attain them? What information do we need to build our action plans? What information is needed by teams to make them more efficient and engaged? Answering these questions will help you to select and structure the data to use. Take care to cross reference visible and invisible data to obtain more advanced and more precise indicators and avoid pointless traffic light indicators.
Data-driven culture : How to exploit your data?
Then data must be made available to your teams: How to communicate the data and related information? How to obtain an overall vision of company strategy? Building dashboards is a good start. But it is time to think about more modern tools accessible to all. Visual management screens are a part of the answer. By displaying selected items, your teams have access to the same level of information. This helps you to manage your teams using the same indicators and objectives and provide them with the means necessary to carry out their missions.
With digital visual management, information is updated quickly, thus allowing
your teams to monitor the progress of actions and to take quick decisions to meet
unexpected challenges. It is therefore important that company culture changes to
structure the organisation around data.
You understand that using data can be a significant competitive advantage but you do not know how to go about collecting and exploiting your data. Do not hesitate to contact us to help identify useful data within your organisation and to determine how to make them meaningful and understandable.
* Big data in numbers: The big data revolution – www.lactualite.com
