Data can definitely help a business grow and help those working for a business understand whether the actions they’re taking have had an impact. But how does a business go from utilising their data poorly to being truly data led? Here are our tips for success:
Create a data strategy
- Create a data strategy that incorporates the steps needed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. This should include:
- An analysis of your current data landscape. What data you have and the condition it’s in.
- How available the data is. Does everyone in the organisation have what they need and can they get it when they need it?
- What governance processes do you have in place? Are they good enough? If you have a lot of data quality issues chances are they need improving.
- A data vision. This should detail what you want to be able to achieve with your data in the future. How quickly you would like to achieve this and why you want to achieve this. What business benefits does the vision bring?
- Break each goal of your vision down into its component parts. Create smaller goals that form the parts of your overall goal. These will allow you to celebrate along the way. Try to include the things you can achieve as you complete the smaller goals.
- Details of all the additional data sources needed to achieve your goals.
- Details of new employees needed to achieve your goals and when they need to be hired.
- A breakdown of the Investment needed for training courses in any new technology needed.
- You will likely need additional software/hardware needed to achieve your goals. Therefore you will need to include the costs associated with these.
Leadership team tips
- Everybody on your senior leadership team needs to be fully invested in making a data led business. It takes quite a bit of time and energy to get there. So if there are people at a high level that are not invested it can really disrupt an initiative like this.
- The data strategy mentioned above should be woven into your overall company strategy. Ideally being a data led business should be a key goal of your overall company strategy.
- An obvious one but worth stating. Weave KPIs into your overall company strategy and report on them regularly. If you’re trying to achieve X which metric/s will show that you’ve made improvements in this area and don’t use vanity metrics.
- Create a company dashboard containing these KPIs that’s updated and shared on a regular basis and make sure everyone in the organisation has access.
Data execution tips
- Keep your KPI calculations simple and try not to use acronyms especially if they are not commonly used. You essentially create a language that only “those in the know” understand and can talk about. The consequences of this mean you will exclude a proportion of your employees from understanding what the situation is with your business.
- The same applies to your data science based projects. Everybody in your organisation should be able to explain back to you why a project exists, what it does and why it helps your business. In short keep your explanations simple.
- Create a very easy process for employees to notify the data team when they find any data errors whilst exploring data.
- Document, document and document some more. Documents on data should be easily available to everyone. Some examples to include:
- KPI definitions and the reports in which they are used.
- Report summaries. Each report/dashboard should have a page or link to a page describing the report’s purpose, the KPIs contained in it, data sources, how often it’s updated and a contact name for the person responsible for the report.
- Descriptions on any self service reporting, what data is included and how to use it.
Training and on-boarding tips
- Conduct regular training sessions on how to use the data available to all employees. This should also include regular reminders around their GDPR responsibilities and data security guidance.
- Everybody in your organisation should understand how the business works and how it makes money. The reason that certain metrics exist then becomes clearer. We highly recommend an extended session on this subject when you ever have anyone new join your business.
- Always include a session with someone from your data team when on-boarding new employees. This should include explaining your top level metrics, what they mean and why they are being measured.
- In your on-boarding talk about the company’s goals in becoming a data led business.
Data communication tips
- Report back on a regular basis to the whole business on what has been achieved with the data strategy so far. The updates should include the goals you’ve achieved and the benefits that brought to the business.
- Include members from your data team in discussions around what your product and engineering team are working on. If your data team is finding out about changes to the data being recorded when they come to produce results from an A/B test then something is failing in the communication chain and needs to be fixed.
- Create a process for employees to follow when creating new data.
- Ideally try to embed at least one analyst in your product and engineering team. They can input on data requirements and know exactly what the product team is looking to achieve.
- This can also help in taking actions from your A/B tests. The analyst can help to feed back on what the data shows if an A/B test is unsuccessful and where to concentrate next.
- Make sure your data team are sharing what they find out on a regular basis. This helps keep the whole company informed and might spark some interesting ideas and innovation.
- Conduct regular drop in sessions for those employees who need help with their data.
- Unless the data is classed as personal information or absolutely confidential, try to make as much of your data available as possible. How do you expect your employees to make recommendations on how to improve your business if they can’t get this data?
- Make sure the results, analysis and outcomes from all of your A/B tests are announced to your whole organisation. Keep everybody informed of what’s going on.
- Give regular updates on what your data team is currently working on and the analysis they have completed.
