These days, almost every organization desires to make data-driven decisions. No organization is interested in basing its decisions on intuition alone. Leaders and managers have clearly understood that without proper data, false and biased assumptions might influence decisions. It will only result in poor decision-making. What is required in today’s age is investing in proper and the latest Business intelligence solutions.
6 steps to Derive Data-Driven Business
1. Identify your business objective:
This is the first step to undertake. Outline ‘what, why, when, where, and who’ to make the data for. Is it for the business, for your colleagues, or for you? It is not a linear process and can be iterative in nature. Hence, get to know your organization’s operational and strategic goals. It can be specific like improving site traffic and sales numbers or something ambiguous like improving brand awareness. Get to know your competition and the problems faced in your industry. It can help inference better with the data.
2. Survey business teams to derive key data sources:
Data desired to address specific business-related problems could perhaps be spread across your organization. There might arise the need to coordinate information availed from diverse databases, social media, and web-driven feedback forms. It may appear to be simple to coordinate across different sources. However, identifying common variables amongst each dataset might present significantly difficult problems. Find out if data derived from Customer data platforms can be used for additional future projects or not.
3. Gather and prepare desired data:
In case business information is present across different disconnected sources, then accessing trusted, quality data can prove to be a troublesome task. 80% of time is devoted by data analysts towards organizing and cleaning data while the remaining 20% is used to perform analysis. A solid business strategy makes use of this ‘50/20’ rule. It shows clearly the significance of deriving orderly, clean information.
4. Perform Statistical Analysis:
It starts with analyzing information by using statistical models. During this stage, develop models that can be used for testing data as well as to answer earlier identified business questions. Test diverse models like decision trees, linear regressions, random forest modeling, etc. These can determine the right method for the data set. Also, determine how information should be presented to answer questions posed.
5. Develop better insights:
Find out what new information you learned by collecting statistics. Ask questions to yourself for those you are aware of the answers. For instance, they may be of the opinion that it is what their customers desire or there already exists a market for this product. Test existing assumptions before seeking new information. Once you find the assumptions to be correct, you can derive a better foundation to start your work.
6. Visualize/share insights:
If you are using data for critical thinking, then it means identifying insights. It is necessary to communicate in an engaging and useful way. Data visualization is considered to be a major part of business strategy. Visual representation of the gathered insights from data especially impactfully can help derive a better chance to influence senior leadership decisions. Data visualization can be made accessible through visual elements such as maps, graphs, and charts. This way, you can get to understand better the patterns, outliers, and trends in data. You can transform data into powerful visual insights.
Thus, Data-Driven Business strategies are sure to work well once you implement the above steps.
