A Step By Step Guide To Building A Data Culture

When companies start to work on building a data culture they very often start because they have a particular problem to address; a plunge in revenue, a  mess up with clients, or worse still frauds resulting in heavy losses, declining NPS and even large claims to pay-out.

Solutions to many of the problems can be solved by developing a data culture in your organisation and this can easily be done by working on the 4 Ds of data culture.

Here is a step by step guide to achieving data culture:

1. Data Maturity: The first step towards building a culture of data is giving people access to data. There should be “easy access to data” as well as a single source of truth (SSOT) with proper security and governance in place. People should not have to think about where they can get data and if they should believe the data. Easy data access is the key to developing a culture of data.

2.  Data Literacy: In order to optimize decisions at every level, each and every person in an organization should have some level of data literacy based on their respective job profiles. Some people may only need a basic understanding of data, ability to read graphs and draw conclusions from it. Others may need to do some fundamental analytics on their own, such as aggregate analysis and correlation analysis, to make decisions like which campaign is doing better, what are the drivers of conversion, etc. Similarly, some people may only need to be a data enthusiast and believe in data. You need each member of your company to have some level of data literacy (as per their skills and capability) so that “all the people” make “optimized decisions.”

3. Data-driven leadership: Leading a team is not an easy task and to develop a data culture without having a data-driven leader to see it through is almost impossible. Data culture can only be developed when the leader is in the vanguard of change. The leaders of the organization should understand the power of data as well as analytics and hold the team accountable for their respective work. To build a data culture and optimize solutions, the data-driven leader should have “clear visions on what to do.”

4. Decision-making process: The point of building a data culture is that you don’t make decisions based on your intuitions or emotions but facts and data—projects should be chosen on the expected ROI or impact on the KPI’s. You need to marry “gut with data” so that a systematic data-driven approach to decision-making is taken. This way you have full transparency, allowing you to look back at the decisions you have taken and improve upon them if things go awry.

These steps are not woven out of thin air; they have come about after we failed and learned from our failures eventually succeeding and impacting the KPIs of the organization.

To learn more about the 4D’s and the step by step guide on developing a data culture for your organization please download the free white paper below.

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