Data is all around us. Your organisation has plenty of it, but are you using it to its full potential? 

Businesses that successfully harness their data are the innovators and leaders of their industries. By using data to strengthen business processes, streamline workflows and find out more about their customers, they can increase sales and boost ROI on their tech spend. 

Whatever the reason is for you to do more with your data, here are the fundamentals you need to know before getting your project off the ground.

Understand the questions you are trying to answer.

What is it that you are trying to achieve? Get a real sense of what you want data to do for your organisation. Once you focus on what you want to do, you can start to see what the data capabilities look like. From there, you can define your questions and targets. Do you want to identify your top-performing stores? Do you want to know how many people actually work in the office? Or maybe you want to use data to track how many people use your customer service feature on your mobile app compared to your call centres. Like any journey, you need to know where you are going before you start – and the same applies to success with your data. 

Know how to measure your KPIs.

When talking about the value of data, we are often talking about spotting patterns and trends through data analytics. What is the data telling us? What is happening to impact KPIs? Most businesses that work with data have a comprehensive overview of descriptive analytics – the process of using data to identify trends and relationships. However, those that don’t have joined-up information might have a good understanding of revenue metrics, but miss the mark with delivery, manufacturing or operations, meaning they risk falling behind in optimisation and efficiency. Get the metrics right, so you can start to analyse and ask why. 

Improve data transparency.

By bringing together information from across the business together in one place, the simpler it becomes to collaborate across different teams, driving innovation and new insights. To begin your journey towards data transparency, you need to get your data organised. We suggest you list all your data sources and implement Data Ingestion and Warehousing. Next, pull different data sets from all types of interfaces into one central location. Then you can create Data Pipelines and send them to an analytics platform for further analysing. This will take your data project to the next level.

Don’t just collect data.

Analytics and visualisation tools, such as BigQuery and Looker, help us go back and answer our business questions. ‘Why were our Saturday orders lower than normal? Was it because our staff levels were low? That might explain why Saturday had a 50% drop in revenue.’ These tools help us bring data together in an accessible, easy-to-digest way that allows us to make connections with past and present information. Data can be set up to automatically update in visualisation tools so dashboards are constantly relevant and the quality of your findings improves. Whilst it is possible to do it in-house, Netpremacy is here to help you accelerate this part of the journey.

Build a data-driven mindset.

Start with the management team. Set expectations from the top down with decisions focused around data. Then, you can get everyone in the business involved. Empower your teams, from Marketing to HR, not just the Analysts and Data Scientists. Do this by bringing concepts to life with real-time dashboards to give the exec team an instant vision for how this data mindset can expand across the business. By building a culture around data, everyone can use it to enhance their daily work, whether that contributes to revenue growth or makes tasks more streamlined and efficient. 

These simple steps are the foundations of any data project. But more often than not, they get overlooked. The data world can be very overwhelming. After all, we create 2,500,000 terabytes of data every day. The good news is that any organisation can use data to their advantage. Data-driven companies are 58% more likely to exceed their revenue goals when compared to their non-data-driven peers. So act now and start to turn your data and analytics ambitions into reality.