Every single poor decision or ineffective decision-making process can jeopardise our business success.
To arrive at better decisions, you should already be striving to become more data-driven. Of course, business leaders will always have to make decisions based on imperfect information. But even allowing for the fact the information is not perfect, we still need to use it and try to improve the decision-making process.
Do the following statements sound familiar to you? If so, you are not working in a data-driven organisation, according to an article on the business2community.com website.
- There are no analysts around and decisions are usually driven by a gut feeling.
- You often hear that people think or feel something that should be an objective, verifiable fact.
- Data visualisations have no context – no benchmark, no goal or average lines.
- Reporting serves to justify someone’s existence. It doesn’t generate insights for decisions.
There are six crucial questions you need to ask in order to promote data-driven decision making in your organisation.
- What you should measure?
- What reports do you need to set up in order to obtain these metrics?
- What tools do you need to generate these reports? How about data structure and processes?
- How do you use the tools to generate your reports?
- How should these reports be interpreted to find meaningful insights?
- How can you share these insights on a regular basis with your colleagues?
By using these questions you will obtain a clear idea of a process that will help you shift your organisation towards a data-driven way of doing business.
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