Data-driven decisions
It’s 2020. Organizations are flooded with information from a myriad of sources. Coronavirus is raging across the US and has created significant uncertainty. How does the savvy executive know where to devote time, energy, and budget?
Answer: Manage with data
The best organizations lead with data-driven decisions. Across industry sector and specialization, data-driven decisions level the playing field between organizations and solve a myriad of organizational problems. Amongst such problems is the key organizational question of “how do we, as an organization, make decisions”?
However, apart from key exceptions, many organizations are still embedded in old ways of thinking and old ways of thinking about data. While today’s organization understands the need to leverage data more effectively to compete, 95% of organizations said that “cultural, organizational, and process challenges presented the biggest roadblocks to adoption” of data. Moreover, executive buy-in is a critical driver for any organizational change, and data-driven initiatives are no different.
The Executives role
The Executive of a winning Digital organization must be a data leader, prioritizing data initiatives that show true ROI. For example, aligning Marketing to Sales targets can shed light on which marketing effort resulted in a sale (also known as Marketing campaign attribution). But such ROI cannot be achieved without organizational change. Data literacy initiatives, where every employee is charged with making decisions based on evidence and given the tools to do so, is critical to success. Last, executives can empower every employee in the organization to utilize data and align incentives and organizational priorities to data-driven initiatives.
Most importantly, the executive of a winning Digital organization must be able to tell a story with data, articulating the organization’s core mission in a way that energizes the team and focuses priorities on locations of true, data-driven growth.
How to get started
Begin with a clear assessment of the organizations’ digital maturity, focusing particularly on data maturity and the organizations’ current decision-making processes. Plotting the organization on the “data maturity” continuum is the first step to data-driven growth and allows for easy identification of the next steps.
