Data-driven organizations start with a data culture

Organizations, regardless of industry, face a formidable challenge: acquiring, organizing, and ultimately extracting value from the vast amounts of data they hold.

In the coming years, the world will produce data at an expected rate of 463 exabytes per day. Ten years ago, the world’s total digital storage capacity was only marginally greater. As organizations need to process larger amounts of data, they also need to ensure that they produce valuable data. There are existing processes for doing this, such as extracting and transforming data for analysis. However, for this to be truly effective, organizations need to introduce a data culture across the organization, not just within traditional data teams.

As organizations continue to prioritize extracting value from their data and leveraging it across the enterprise, data teams must collaborate and communicate with other business units. This will generate a strong data culture and ultimately enable companies to become data-driven organizations.

To make this possible, organizational leaders can take the following steps: create mutual understanding between teams to overcome barriers, identify the impact data has across the business, and clearly demonstrate the value teams bring to end users.

Create mutual understanding between teams

Whether data teams are traditionally centralized or scattered across an organization, mutual understanding and alignment – ​​regarding where data comes from and how it is used – is vital to success.

One of the best starting points for organizations to come to a mutual understanding of the need to move from a process-oriented to a data-oriented mindset. Being data-centric means having a data-centric mindset: valuing data over processes and allowing easy access to the data that will inform decision-making. Ultimately, this switch fosters a strong data culture, because everyone has agreed to use the right data from trusted sources.

In addition to adopting this mindset, teams across the organization must interest data-centric to ensure full engagement for later success. To do this, leaders across the company need to explain the “why” and “how” behind data orientation to their teams: Why data orientation is important; Why and how it affects their roles; how they can take steps to be more data-centric.

Explaining this importance and making sure individuals know why they need this mindset and how to implement it will help the entire organization adapt.

Identify the internal impact of data

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the only people who can process and understand data are data teams.

However, there are many roles within an organization that generate valuable data and intelligence in their own unique way. For example, reporting and analytics teams integrate and transform data to make it more digestible for less data-centric teams in the form of reports or dashboards. Leadership teams need to take advantage of this information and use it to make stronger, data-driven decisions. Likewise, the marketing or sales department can also use data to increase team efforts and meet customer needs faster.

Along with each of these steps, business leaders need to identify the impact data is having on teams and what these different teams are doing to improve their work.

This will allow the larger organization to show the diverse impact of data. Identifying this impact internally is another great step in building a data culture.

The impact of data on the end user

Data can have multiple implications for your customers, such as making processes more efficient and increasing the speed at which organizations can complete a task. Most importantly, customers can make more informed business decisions based on data rather than instinct or guesswork.

With a deluge of data and different data sources, it can be easy for teams to get overwhelmed and misaligned when sharing deliverables. Aligning different teams within an organization to work together and focus on delivering incremental value creates a cohesive data-driven culture with minimal team friction.

Working in smaller steps also ensures that teams prioritize items for the end user at all times. All of this will show the organization what its work is achieving and reiterate the importance of building a data-driven culture – and ultimately that the organization is truly becoming a data-driven organization.

As organizations strive to make their data usable and establish data-driven cultures, an entire organization needs to be on board. By creating a mutual understanding between teams to overcome barriers, identify the impact of data, and clearly identify the value data brings to end users, leaders can increase their teams’ data-centric culture.

Once organizations can implement this across the board, data becomes useful, increasing business value and efficiency for the enterprise.

Ian Funnell is developer relations manager at Matillion.