It’s been a while since data exploded globally, and the vital necessity for businesses to deal with it is in no way surprising. Many look up to data-oriented enterprises, such as Google and Facebook, and follow suit. But while most companies try to move with the times and put data at the center of their operations, it often remains untapped.
Unleashing the data potential is only possible in a data-driven environment—the one in which data is recognized as a critical business asset, and each team member has access and knowledge required to turn this data into useful insights. Data-driven companies never miss a chance to take advantage of their data resources. Reports, spreadsheets, charts and all the other information sources help everyone involved in decision making—which is in fact almost every employee—to make use of corporate data deposits.
Luckily, the market is full of tools created to facilitate this challenging task and automate data retrieval and analytics, so that the only thing left to do for decision-makers is to act on the results. Still, according to the Big Data Executive Survey conducted by NewVantage Partners in 2018, 99% of respondents from 57 large corporations said their companies were trying to shift to a data-driven culture, yet only one-third of them succeeded. Does this mean that they did something wrong, or was it the BI tools they deployed that turned out to be not that effective?
A business intelligence tool is a data-driven decision support system (DSS), used to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data. Today, the market is rich with BI platforms offering various types of analytics, visualization and integration capabilities: some of them are AI-powered and thus able to make reliable forecasts. Many BI tools have unique features and attractive add-ons, but all of them offer essential functions that may boost a business if used wisely.
Today, the leading platform on the market is Microsoft Power BI. Very similar in its interface to other products by Microsoft, this tool provides both basic features for non-expert users and those for pro-level analysts. However, Power BI integration may require help from a specialized provider.
To evaluate how critical BI tools are for establishing a data-driven environment, we need to understand what this environment demands. As said before, a data-driven company is the one that understands how to gain a competitive edge by using analytics. But while some companies were launched after the Big Data bang and thus had more chances to create a data-driven culture from the outset, others need an actual shift in their business mindset to inject data into decision making and adopt it as a regular and automated process.
The following are some basic principles any data-oriented company should act upon.
Though 56% of the respondents in the NewVantage Partners survey were chief data officers, only 12% of the companies participating in the 2012 installment of the same survey had chief data officers appointed at all. Even if there’s no CDO, leaders should set the expectation that decisions must be based on data.
