“The most valuable thing you can have as a leader is clear data.” – Ruth Porat, CEO at Google and Alphabet Inc.
The graphic below is pulled from research done into the importance of information for decision making.
According to the study, roughly one-third of organisations currently use information to identify new business opportunities and predict future trends and behaviour. The other two-thirds plan to do so in the future.
What prevents organisations from making data-driven decisions?
- Availability of information – The study notes that the most common reason for an organisation not using information in their decision-making process is that the available information was not readily available.
- Data Quality – The second biggest detractor from data-driven decision making is the quality of data.
This calls for better processes for data capture, collection and data governance to ensure good quality data.
62% of companies said they want to treat information as an asset in the future. Reinforcing the importance organisations should place on investing in protecting the quality and value of that asset.
How to improve data-driven decision making?
According to the study 50% of business decisions are made from data, but only half of an organisations data is actually used for the decision making. In order to make more informed decisions a few things need to be done:
- Improve the data quality
- Lower the cost of access to information
- Improve the way in which information is presented
- Make the information easier to find
- Keep the information up-to-date
- Make senior management aware of business intelligence
Where does data for decision-making come from?
The average number of internal sources of information used for decision-making is 5. Around half of the respondents also said this number is increasing over time. Most companies are dealing with multiple sources of data, which increases the:
- TIME taken to collect data
- Likelihood of data QUALITY ISSUES
- DIFFICULTY of data analysis
As data volume, structure and complexity increases so does the need for data management. For management to fully use data to inform their decisions – the data needs to be collated and organised into a central database that stores, analyses and visually represents this data in a way that is understandable and beneficial to them.
GCX Digital and our Eco-Analytics Dashboard assist companies in making sense of their data through the collection, analysis, visualisation and reporting of data. If there is anything else you would like to know about our Eco-Analytics Dashboard, please don’t hesitate to ask us a question at info@gcx.co.za or give us a call on +27 (0)21 702 4058