Partner Article

Business Intelligence: Overcoming 3 Obstacles for Data Adoption

It’s no secret that the modern enterprise collects a vast amount of data. The digital age has made gathering, organizing and storing data easier than ever—either in manual or semi-manual means (e.g. employees filling out spreadsheets), or via software tools that collect data automatically in the course of their work (examples could include CRM systems such as Salesforce, marketing automation software such as Marketo, or web analytics tools such as Google Analytics).

So whether you want to or not, it’s likely that your business is already producing a great deal of data. But what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, unless you start putting it to good use.

Data can be an invaluable asset—it can help you understand business processes, weaknesses and strengths in your organization, and help you reach more informed decisions when you’re at a crossroads. But if you’re not examining the data and making it part of your decisionmaking process, it’s not providing any real value to you. Unfortunately, in most companies I’ve worked for, the latter seemed to be the case.

Let’s look at 3 common obstacles that prevent companies from adopting data-driven decisionmaking in their day-to-day operations, and some suggestions for how to bypass them.

#1 Data Isn’t Sexy Enough

Typically the people at the company who could benefit most from data are the ones that need to see a bird’s-eye view of the way a team, department, or the entire business is operating. However, managers aren’t necessarily numbers people, and the idea of delving into data stored across multiple, often incomprehensible tables could seem decidedly unattractive to them.

Solution: Visualize

As the cliche’ goes, pictures speak louder than words—and when it comes to understanding data, pie charts and line graphs are certainly easier to understand and more visually appealing than tables. So to simplify data and make it easier for the less mathematically-inclined to make sense of it, try to present it in visual form whenever possible.

#2 Intuition Bias

Even when managers can understand data, they often simply choose not to in cases when the data seems to conflict with the opinions they brought with them from home. Again, this is only human: we tend to trust our intuitions, and the higher up we get, the further proof we believe to possess that our gut instinct is infallible. Hence, many managers prefer to make decisions based on what they see as their “killer instinct”, and if they examine the data at all it’s only to seek confirmation for a call they’ve already made.

Solution: Set a Personal Example

To increase data-driven decisionmaking across the organization, you need to change your corporate culture. Start making your own decisions based on data, and justifying them via factual analysis, and your subordinates will soon follow. Make it clear that discussions and arguments are not settled by who can make the strongest rhetoric, or who ranks highest in corporate hierarchy—but by whoever can produce a logical, informed analysis that can convincingly justify her position.

#3 Data is Difficult to Access

Even in organizations in which there is genuine will to start utilizing data, management often finds it difficult to actually reach this data and access it in any useful way. This is mainly true when the data is too big, or too disparate to be effectively processed in Excel (this is often the case when data is messy and disorganized, coming from different sources, or simply too large for Excel to handle in a reasonable speed). Often to make heads or tails of this data the company needs to hire a dedicated analyst or turn to IT to generate reports. This could work on a small scale, but when there are only a handful of individuals who can produce these reports, soon a bottleneck forms and only the higher-ups can actually see the data, and even then in fairly restricted, and not particularly timely ways.

Solution: Consider Dashboard Software

Companies that have large amounts of data, or are dealing with complex datasets—and can afford the initial investment —might want to consider acquiring BI and dashboard software. Broadly speaking, these are tools that organize data coming from multiple sources, then present a centralized view of the data which can be freely accessed by any manager or employee in the company (here are some nice examples of dashboards). These tools often don’t come cheap (as is the case with most enterprise management), but can be a game changer for companies that want to get serious about data.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Eran Levy .