Becoming a Data-Driven Decision-Making Organisation

In the quest of becoming a data-driven organization, one must first learn to navigate the treacherous and complex terrain of data management. This path is not easy nor effortless, but for the persistent wanderer a great reward awaits. In the article 

”Becoming a Data-Driven Decision-Making Organisation” 

Ellie Hume and Amy West presents seven prominent challenges of becoming a data-driven organization, as well as how to counteract these by describing which countermeasures to deploy. Even though the article is mainly focused on non-profit organizations, the challenges are still arguably applicable in a profit-seeking context as well.

1. “Choosing the right data”

With the vast expansion of available data, it is paramount to choose and set the right requirement for future data generation.

2. “Identifying the right tools”

Due to excessively many providers of data analytics software it could be difficult to find a software that is suitable in different contexts.

3. “Building experience”

As with all changes in organizations, building experience of working with data is essential to be able to analyze and draw conclusions from data.

4. “Handling decentralized data”

Regarding decentralized data, organizations often have different departments which may consist of several different systems and databases. In that case, you need to know how to deal with those systems and how to integrate them with each other.

5. “Ensuring data integrity”

Ensuring data integrity is crucial in order to trust the data, because if it is inaccurate or inconsistent it will only guide you in the wrong direction. Thus, it is important to establish standards of how data should be collected and who is responsible for it.

6. “Creating a cultural shift”

All the previous challenges are in some sense related to the culture, therefore in order to transform into a data-driven organization the culture must transform as well.

7. “Becoming truly data-driven”

A data-driven decision-making organization is not only about collecting the right data and presenting it in a fancy way, it is also about taking correct fact-based decisions, and then acting upon those insights.