Data Driven Success
This is the first article in a series which will discuss the importance of being data driven and provides a no-nonsense guide on how to best transition your organisation. This article details why you should care about your data and what benefits you can get from improving your data quality and leveraging it to improve your operational efficiency.
Later articles will discuss how to take stock of your existing digital health, how to improve your data quality, how to automate your processes and finally how to implement your dream data solution.
PART 1: WHY BOTHER?
Good data can transform an organisation.
In today’s fast-paced, information-rich, and uncertain world, it’s more important than ever to have accurate and up-to-date information at your fingertips. Trusted data and automated processes will improve your organisation’s efficiency and enable business leaders to make informed decisions to navigate the economic headwinds and grow their business.
With accurate and trusted data, you will have the ability to see the big picture, but with the granularity to access to data insights and be able to spot hereto hidden trends. Your reports should be interactive and informative, providing you with the insights to manage your organisation efficiently and allows you to ask specific-detailed questions about your data and your business.
Take this hypothetical example: Julie from marketing works at a medium-sized enterprise that sells energy drinks. She is struggling to evaluate which marketing campaigns worked the best and where to invest her marketing budget to get the maximum return on investment. She is provided with a new digital dashboard which consolidates data from her CRM, Stock and Finance systems. This allows her to be able compare the sales activity in the weeks following recent marketing campaigns and shows that while some campaigns have generated higher sales, they are actually less profitable than others due to greater discounting. Julie can now interrogate the data to spot the hidden trends that lead to higher sales and greater profits (who knew that Tuesday at 11:30am was the best time to advertise on local radio?).
Despite this being a hypothetical example, implementing data-driven solutions leads to real-world benefits to your business. Here are just a few stats that show the benefits of being data driven.
85% of Organisations view data as one of their most valuable assets.
Data Integration can lead to 410% ROI*
79% of businesses say that automation has improved productivity and 61% reduced costs.
Average ROI on process automation leads is 630%
Unfortunately, while many organisations are data rich, they are often unable to leverage the value of that data. Their data is trapped in a multitude of systems that do not talk to each other. Data is incomplete, contradictory and time consuming to report upon. All of this impacts the ability to effectively manage an organisation and reduces growth.
Here are some interesting stats to show this:
Research from Experian Data Quality shows inaccurate data impacts the bottom line of 88% of businesses, with the average company losing 12% of its revenue as a direct result.
40% of enterprise data is either inaccurate, incomplete, or unavailable.
Less than 0.5% of all data is ever analysed and used.
19.8% of business time is wasted by employees searching for information necessary to do their job effectively (1 day per week!)
You can see for yourself, that the statistics around poor quality data are really quite shocking. And quite worryingly, this can have a significant effect on an organisation’s bottom line.
Let’s take the Experian data that the average company loses 12% of its revenue as a direct result of bad data. How much of your turnover would that 12% represent? Imagine if your data is only half as bad as the average, or a quarter – even when being conservative that’s still a huge amount of revenue and profit lost every single year. What difference would that extra revenue and profit make to you and your stakeholders?
Every business manager or owner should be asking themselves: Are you making the most of your data, and if not, how much potential revenue are you losing as a result?
If you have any questions or wish to discuss this topic in more detail, then you are more than welcome to contact me with any of the following contact details at the end of this article.
