Sunday, January 25, 2015

Data Savvy Mind: How Does it Influence Business Culture and Performance

Mind shift is the very foundation to transform from doing analytics projects to running an intelligent organization.
Digital is the age of Big Data. from doing data analytics project to shaping a data-savvy mind is a leapfrogging transformation, because it will fundamentally change the business culture and leadership style, also change the way to serve customers and engage employees.


A data-savvy mind can lead more persuasive and evidence-based communication.  How to make effective communication much depends on the individual, the enterprise, and the corporate culture. That said, the keys to communicating data to the board aren't that different than the keys to any strong communication. It's critical to listen to what stakeholders need from data - that makes it far more likely that they'll be truly engaged, and eager in what data can deliver. Also, it's important to use data to tell a story. That can be a different way to look at the process of data. But it's not "just the facts" - it's the business impact of those facts that ensures engagement.


A data-savvy mind doesn’t ignore the experiences or intuition. It's critical for leaders to communicate the real value of data in clear, actionable business terms. But, of course, that's a big part of what data has to do - be transformed into actionable insight. Also, a strong point for promoting a savvy mindset, especially among c-level executives, is stressing the fact that being data-driven does not mean experience and intuition are obsolete. Data is a simple way to supplement reason when making decisions and can even help reduce risk. Another common challenge to executives seems to be that it's too complex to practically implement. To the very least, executives should at least explore their options and possibilities, since being data savvy is becoming a norm in most companies today.


A data-savvy mind can drive data driven behaviors which vary from functional level to a large-scale organizational level. One common example, companies can  improve customer experience or make marketing campaigns based on all kinds of data. This would likely involve business intelligence software to analyze your existing customers to come up with a customer profile of the age, gender, lifestyle, etc. of the people who are likely to buy from you. Then, you can even get more specific. The data may show you that you have multiple audiences that are likely to buy your products. You can analyze the data even more to find out which audiences are likely to buy certain products and which audiences are not likely to purchase other products, so that you can maximize your marketing dollars by targeting people who are more likely to purchase.

Both corporate executives and front line customer representatives need to equip with such data savvy mindset. For business leaders, such thinking drives good habits to always make effective decisions well mixing the data and intuition at strategic level; and for the front line employees, they can also make data driven decision at transnational level to either delight customers or improving business processes.Mind shift is the very foundation to transform from doing analytics projects to running an intelligent organization.

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