Mohammed Kaiser elaborates on the importance of data and how one can become more dynamic, lean, and fast-paced.
We have processed information from various sources over the onset of time. Based on information around us, we have been making informed decisions every day in our lives. Hence, it’s safe to say, either voluntarily or involuntarily, in a structured or unstructured manner, we have processed data and made all the decisions in our day to day lives. Be it buying a car or a house, going on a holiday, finding a restaurant to eat etc. we have tapped into all possible information and gathered insights, derived from various data points and sources to decide what’s good for us. And this is what data driven decision is all about.
The global business environment is continuously evolving to become more dynamic, lean, and fast-paced. Time is of essence, and it has also become one of the greatest commodities. If organizations don't take action immediately based on their micro and macro business environments, they lose their competitive advantage and customers. Technically, with the impact of globalization, we are working in a 24/7 environment. Old fashioned business meetings to make decisions and plan actions are becoming obsolete. Access to instant data, driving insights and translating the same into reasonable information to make immediate decisions, gets us ahead of the curve. In other words, it must be a live environment. There is no place for good companies anymore; only great companies can live and survive to meet expectations in today’s environment.
Our body is always gathering data from our surrounding environment, that it adapts for us to function. We see, touch, feel, smell, taste, listen and hear. All these data points help our brain process to ensure our wellbeing, in a live environment. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of live data pieces and snippets that help our body to make decisions daily. Similarly, in an organization there are many data points and sources that are embedded in it’s business environment (internal and external) that can be mined and harnessed to streamline data-driven decision making.
Often, the volume of unprocessed data sitting in any organization is quite large-scale. The questions remain: how is data being used in today’s business environment? Are organizations leveraging data insights to evolve and make smart decisions? Are organizations structured to gain competitive advantage and increase their revenue/profit margins? Are organizations focused on delivering superior service quality and customer satisfaction using data they have? Do organizations have the right technology suited for their business needs? Based on industry research, more than 60% of data in most organizations remain untapped. On a positive side, research of 330 public companies in North America indicated that the top third of companies in their respective industry were 6% more profitable than their competitors, just by using data-driven decisions.
There is dark unseen data that often become blind spots where organizations need to target. These may be related to processes, time and motion, historic information (customer surveys, geographic data, asset performance and failures, maintenance tasks etc) or people. The importance of having a strategic and goal driven approach to use relevant data and cleanse that is not required is of paramount importance. People are the largest drivers and holders of data. Hence both bottom down and vice versa engagement is critical to understand the overall behavior of an organization. Drilling downstream to record every observation and variable, method of consolidations, identifying correlations, removing biases and personal representations to record minutest data should be the start of a greater journey to achieve data-driven decisions.
