What the Heck is Data-Driven Culture?

There’s plenty of good reason to adopt data analytics. We do not need to shout this from the rooftops anymore. Whether it is to improve processes, identify that supply chain bottleneck, assess the right product-market fit, predict customer preferences to design customer experiences – data is the new soil.

However, the power of data is phenomenal – can we really contain it to only a specific department, or should we extend it to the entire organization and across it?

‘Data-Driven’ is the new goal for organizations using data today. It is not just about using data – it is about eliminating all data silos, democratizing access to data, and consolidating it so that every company user knows where to find the data and how to use it.

Companies like Airbnb have been successful in democratizing data and data science. The company has ensured that decision-makers have easy access to data anytime, anywhere. They have ensured that data science tools are available easily and can be accessed and used by even those who are not data scientists. They encourage and enable employees to work with data and put this data in the heart of all their decisions.

The above example seems almost like the organization utopia for companies looking towards establishing a data-driven culture. So, what goes into creating a data-driven culture and, consequently, a data-driven enterprise?

A data-driven culture starts at the top. When the C-suite sets the expectation that all decisions must be rooted in data, then this becomes the organization’s ‘normal’ state of existence. It is no longer novel. No longer exceptional.

If the C-suite decides to make decisions only ‘evidence-based’, then the employees also start communicating with the leadership and amongst themselves using the same language. This helps in bringing about a shift in company-wide practices and replaced the proverbial gut feel with solid insights derived from hardcore data analytics and data science.

The term ‘culture’ relates to the collective behaviors of a set of people or society. ‘Culture’, in the organizational context, also has to be implemented and followed by the collective majority (if, not everyone).

Unless a majority of the people in the organization develop the habit of using data in their everyday decision-making, can we even call it a culture? For an organization to become data-driven, it must enable data use for all its employees and not just a select few data scientists. This means employing and implementing a data science platform that can be used just as easily by the business users as the data scientists.

It means organizations need to create opportunities that will encourage their entire workforce, and not just the data scientists and data specialists, to interact and play with data. Educating the entire workforce on how to become data-driven can help them deliver more, deliver better, optimize work, and improve output and decision-making. Giving them easy-to-use data science tools helps in driving the data-culture down to the last employee.

‘Data-Driven’ is not an abstract concept. And for it to become an organization culture, we must know what outcomes to expect.