You are a bank manager. You discover the customer churn rate of your bank which has steadily increased. You realise a loophole in retaining the existing customers of your bank. To validate your instincts, you gather the past six month’s data of customers and hire an analyst to come up with the results quickly. But here is the problem. Analyst working on the project realises that the data has a lot of noise, is not captured at a granular level, is coming from multiple sources, not a single version of the truth and is also limited. Hence insights can’t be drawn at the required time. This results in loss of business.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you? The reason behind this grief is the bank is not a data-driven organization. Is your organization data driven? Do you embrace data? Can you provide decision makers of your company with the data they need? Does your organization make business decisions with the help of high quality, noise free, granular data? Are all the data sources integrated at one place providing a single version of the truth? If your answer is yes, then congratulations!! You are indeed a data-driven organization.
But if the answer is no, you should infuse analytics in your company. In today’s digital age, we are engulfed with an enormous amount of data. It is an acceptable fact that organizations who have the knowledge to extract insights and decisions based on data would be at a competitive edge rather than the organizations who still have not understood its value. We’re in a digital transformation age where data is more valuable than ever. Companies would only be able to have a competitive edge if they truly understand the power of data and promote the use of data in decision-making.
Switching to a data-driven organization usually takes time, but hard work pays off. Constructing this sudden shift is a tedious process but this journey from capturing data to making it trustworthy ensures everybody in the company is on the same page with the most updated information at their fingertips. So how do you turn to a data-driven organization? Below are few points to get started:
Information Management:
Start capturing the data from the most granular level. Each single field should be detail-oriented. This ensures that every single detail of all the business processes in an organization is identified and stored in databases.
Data Integration:
Often data does not reside on a single data source. We rely on data warehouses to integrate our disparate data sources. Traditional data warehousing can take up to 6 months to 1 year and significant effort to complete. Surely this is not the right way to stay competitive in today’s ever-changing and ever-evolving data landscape. Is there any solution to optimize the data warehouse lifecycle? This is where automation comes to rescue. We now have self-service data warehouse tools with drag and drop capabilities just like modern BI tools. TimeXtender is a leading data warehouse automation tool which automates the entire cycle of implementing and maintaining a DWH/BI solution. Other notable vendors in this space are Wherescape and Attunity.
Next Gen BI Tools:
Are you still using traditional BI tools for data integration and reporting? If yes, then you have already lost half the battle. Businesses today can’t wait for weeks or months for the BI reports. And this is where self-service BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, Qlik provide an edge over the traditional IT-centric reporting tools. You can have dashboards/reports in just a few clicks without any involvement of IT.
Teamwork and Collaboration:
This should be one of the key focus areas to become a data-driven organization truly. Self-service BI tools provide a platform that allows analyst, data scientists, decision makers to work collaboratively and act sensibly on approaches for deriving insights of a company. With the help of collaboration, all the members working on a data intensive project are now able to collaboratively work with real-time access to all the features of a BI tool.
Training & Reskilling:
Employees should have basic knowledge of reporting skills. Also, the power users of analytics must be reskilled and trained with the latest development in analytics space. This ensures that your organization is well equipped to support value-driven decision making.
Welcoming a data-driven approach is vital to your organization. It helps you in making decisions that are informed, intelligent and impactful. To understand more about making powerful decisions that lead to desired results, Register for webinar recording on Make powerful decisions with Power BIÂ
