Carly Fiorina
Are you using your organizational data to make smart, data-driven business decisions?
As the needs for data insights increase, getting value out of your organization data is more important than ever before. And, the correct performance metrics should help to guide your decision-making processes.
Mostly importantly, by understanding how your customers or constituents are engaging with your organization, your team can design and tailor programs and services aligned to unique and collective customer interests. This will help you to be intentional about how you connect with your customers to advance their relationship with your organization.
In addition, effective data visualization can help you to spot trends, patterns, and outliers. To accelerate your organisation, business insights and customer knowledge within custom visualizations make your data easier to understand while empowering you to better understand your customer data and start driving actionable solutions.
As Peter Drucker said, “what gets measured, gets managed."
A data-driven operation makes decisions based on research and evidence. In other words, organisations can be more confident in their actions since there is data to support their decisions. Unfortunately, nowadays, there is often too much information available to make a clear and actionable decision. Data becomes a competitive advantage only if the organization leverags it properly. So, having data is important, but it is not enough.
An organisation needs to analyze and communicate the valuable information inside of that data, often through dashboards or other visualization tools. And, to make that process useful start by 1) defining a business question, 2) identifying the key performance indicators and 3) shaping the data. Following these basic steps [as below] sets the stage to create a strategic framework that will help to perform more useful data analysis.
And, consequently, you will be able to find meaning in your data to improve and optimize decisions and performance.
Defining your business question
Your business question should be clear, concise, and most importantly measurable. By defining your core query from the beginning, you will know if you have the right data to answer your question, or whether you have further work to ensure are identify and collecting what you need.
Identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs)
The key performance indicators must answer your business question. In this step you need to decide what to measure and how. Be careful to not include too many or loosely-related KPIs. Rather than too many top-line measures, it is better to use some secondary indicators to drill down on your KPIs and answer the “why” behind the results.
Shaping the data
At this point you have a clear business question and know how to measure it. Depending on the data visualization package, you probably want to organize your raw data in a tabular format (i.e., a table with rows and columns). And, continue by determining what information already exists in your database. If the information that you have is not enough to answer the business question, collect new data. After you have collected the right data to answer your business question, it is time to analyze your data and use the results of your data analysis process to decide your best course of action.
German Rodriguez, currently at the University of Calgary, is an experienced researcher and data analyst and an associate of D3 Advancement Studio.
