ChristianSteven BI Blog

Leverage Data to Support Your Business Vision

Economic uncertainty and volatility characterize the current global business environment.  In good times, corporations scramble to meet demand and add capacity while standing out from the competition, and at the same time feeling particularly attracted to a growing and robust market.

In challenging times, businesses struggle to encourage reluctant clients and control costs while retaining sufficient resources and personnel to respond promptly when the market evolves and recovers. Whether the market conditions are good or bad, there are multiple opportunities for corporations to leverage their preparedness to remain competitive and maintain steady growth.

Having a clear business vision is one of the initial steps to staying competitive during a recession. A clear business vision helps you stay agile and secure and keeps your customers returning.

For many organizations, the question that keeps their executives up at night is deciding on their IT spending strategy for the next two years. Recent reports indicate that Microsoft is reducing staff in areas such as consulting and partner solutions while adding staff in other -- more technical -- areas. At the same time, Gartner suggests that a tight labor market, rising inflation, and a possible recession have more companies looking to outsource IT to stay within budget. Is there a right strategy?

The best strategy is a data-driven one. Management must look at technology trends to decide what technologies to implement. They have to evaluate the cost and determine what resources are needed to achieve a successful deployment. Without data, executives are only guessing at what the impact of their IT spending strategy will be.

Did you know that our brains are biased towards the negative? That negative orientation is probably why we are more familiar with a vicious cycle than a virtuous one. Yet, a virtuous circle also known as the snowball effect is a recurring cycle of events that reinforces itself through feedback resulting in continuous improvement. It is the process that underpins Amazon's Flywheel. 

In 2001, Jeff Bezos sketched what he called the virtuous cycle on a napkin. Data is collected during each customer experience. That data is used to refine the customer profile. The more a consumer uses Amazon, the more data is assembled ultimately creating a personalized experience for millions of users. Each iteration moves a potential buyer through the sales funnel until Amazon is recommending products customers didn't know they needed. 

Amazon's feedback loop allowed the company to inform its product design. As the company interjected data earlier in its customer experience design, the better the end results and at a lower cost to the company. Without data, Amazon would not realize its virtuous cycle.

More organizations are moving to distributed architectures for their computer networks. The traditional monolithic systems do not provide the flexibility, resiliency, and scalability that distributed computing offers. With the growing number of users, devices, and data that reside outside the security perimeter, organizations have to re-evaluate how to secure the edges of their networks without restricting access to critical data for Power BI Reporting.

And why you need to know

Literacy usually refers to the ability to read and write; however, literacy is really competence or knowledge in a specific area, such as data literacy. To be data literate, individuals need a skill set that includes reading, manipulating, communicating, and producing data for critical use. These are skills that 82% of all employers expect their employees to have. Yet, few educational systems spend time teaching data skills across the curriculum. As a result, less than 30% of the US workforce feels data literate.

While employers expect data-literate employees, 68% of business executives struggle to create measurable value from data. Almost 75% of executives said their data analytic projects failed to produce actionable insights. The lack of data literacy has a significant impact on productivity. According to a recent study, companies lose an average of 43 hours of work per employee per year because of data-induced procrastination and absenteeism.

What is even more concerning is how few employees rely on data when making decisions. Almost half of employees trust their "gut" over data when making a decision. More than 65% of C-suite executives and senior management go with their gut over data-driven insights. Such weak data literacy skills are impeding business growth. For example, 36% of employees avoid using data and find an alternative method to complete a task. Almost 15% of workers would avoid doing the data-driven task completely.