Enabling Data Driven Transformations: A Recipe for Data Culture

Data Driven Decisions? 

Time and again, I meet business leaders and teams who claim to have data-driven cultures within their teams simply because they happen to look at reports with some key metrics before making decisions. I don’t think that’s a new practice. Leaders have always worked with relevant facts, executive summaries, and progress reports. They assess each situation and use what they have learned, combined with their experience and knowledge, to make what they believe are informed decisions 

But are these decisions truly data driven? Let’s consider, for a moment, two marketing departments in separate organizations. Each marketing department runs a major holiday campaign on social media networks. At the first weekly review, they evaluate week 1 summaries provided by their advertising agencies. The summaries include the following: 

Clicks high all week, major drop in purchases after day 5 of the campaign

Organization A may categorize its decision to reallocate funds to another campaign as a “data-driven decision.” But is it? Looking at both situations, the marketing teams in each organization received reports from another entity that provides data on sales attributable to the campaigns in question. But here’s what differentiates organization B from organization A: 

● Organization B’s team can self-serve with analytics. They are familiar with tools and datasets needed to answer necessary and investigative questions independently without going through other departments or vendors. 

● The team has access to real-time data. This allows them to reassess midweek or after a few days rather than waiting for the weekly/monthly or end of campaign report from advertisers. 

● The team has access to historical data and can further analyze insights themselves to answer new questions, rather than relying on static historical reports. 

● The team can experiment and repivot as needed through the visibility they acquired around membership conversions. This ensures that the organization capitalizes on all opportunities (i.e., memberships). 

The marketing team in Organization B is data driven. They can fully capture the value of data allowing them to optimize the organization’s campaign budgets, answer business questions, plan future campaigns, and maximize profits.

Success factors in becoming a data-driven organization

Becoming data driven is something that is embraced by teams and not just leaders. It’s a culture rather than an approach. To implement a data-driven culture, organizations should get the following in place:

1. An Independent Data Office

A data department or office should be independent. The data office works for the common good and is a partner to every other department offering them value combined with good data. The principles of the data office should be centered around data quality and data democracy.

2. Companywide buy-in on the data

This is one of the few elements that start top down in data, everything else is bottom up. In order for the organization to realize the value of data, the CDO will need to become its champion and have the full support of the organization’s leadership. 

3. A supportive internal structure that helps facilitate data quality accountability and the development of actionable insights

Everyone that touches data, reads a report, extracts insights, or makes a decision based on data will have to embrace the new data culture. They must know and fulfill their responsibilities when it comes to working with data — this encompasses almost everyone within the organization.

4. Solid data and technology infrastructure that support self-serve analytics and reporting

Data should be simple, available, and shareable. The technology stack should enable business teams to access the data that they need to extract insights and answer pertinent questions.

The upcoming second part of this article (next month) will provide more detail on the four steps outlined above to provide a recipe for starting the journey to become truly data driven. Ensuring that these recipe items are in place will allow data culture to take shape within the organization. 

Returning to our example of Organizations A and B for a moment, Organization A’s marketing team was limited in terms of the data that they could review and discuss to make decisions. This resulted in poor decision making, a lack of insights that could lead to misguided marketing, wasted opportunities on memberships, and the possibility of unnecessary overhead costs and dependency on external parties. I don’t think there are any leaders who would want this to happen within their organizations. If the end goal is to make better decisions more often to solve business problems, then developing and implementing a data culture becomes a means to an end.

Data culture is a profound shift that has become a key variable in business strategy execution. Adopting a data culture will empower organizations to leverage their data and become truly data-driven organizations. 

Mai AlOwaish is the Chief Data & Innovation Officer at Gulf Bank. She is a seasoned information systems and data analytics expert with 20 years of experience between Kuwait and the United States where she spearheaded a variety of data analytics and e-commerce initiatives, and enabled digital transformation for financial institutions, retailers, airlines, and more. AlOwaish is a published author, speaker, an award winner and also a current board member in the Digital Analytics Association.