Beyond digital transformation: how data analysis can drive business decisions

Data-led insights can help business managers in proactive decision-making. They not only improve the day-to-day operational decision making, but also strategic decision making. Data can empower business managers significantly during business and digital transformation initiatives by helping them improve their understanding of customers, products and marketing spend.

Alongside digital transformation, we now see the development of ‘data transformation’, a more efficient way of collecting, cleaning and analyzing data. The two processes are tightly connected, as no digital transformation can succeed if data is not ready for business problem solving and insight generation. Having said that, one must also realize that this is a journey. Data can never be perfect in a growing business. Business managers need to take decisions and data must enable that. It’s therefore important to run both processes – 1) continuous improvement in data foundation and 2) building more analytics maturity to enable effective decision making – in parallel to each other.

It is becoming apparent that data, from collection to analysis, has become an important component for businesses around the world, regardless of the sector. This is having a growing impact not only on organizations but also on employees. Those who, within an organization, are directly involved with applying data to the company processes can be considered data analysts in some way.

We can always divide the organization into a pyramid. At the bottom are ‘novices’; they are using spreadsheets like Excel and lot of reports or dashboards for day-to-day decision making. 60% of the organization can be novices. Then there are data ‘semi-professionals’; they know a little bit about data-handling tools like SQL or visualization tools like Tableau, which enables them to go beyond Excel and use data more effectively. They make for 15% of the organization. Then you have data ‘professionals’, who have the knowledge of precise data science techniques and tools to enable accurate and proactive decision making. There are 10% of such professionals. Finally, you have the data ‘champions’ at the top; they evangelize data-led thinking in the organization and lead transformation projects. They comprise of up to 5% of the organization.

While a differentiation of duties and levels of knowledge within the workforce can help the organization to be more efficient, it could prove highly beneficial to make sure that everyone is trained to productively use data.

I feel this is more of a social challenge than a technical challenge. We often think that without advanced tools and techniques training, we cannot use data. However, a lot of the time it has been seen that in spite of heavy investments in this area, results are minimal. This will continue to happen until individuals develop the belief in the power of data. Those who believe should try simple things to start in order to make sense out of the organization data lying all around them.