Do you think of IT as the fun, cool part of the business? The one that’s always innovating and keeping up with the latest technologies? Read on this blog to know the role of IT in building a Data Culture
While it can be exciting, it’s also important to remember that role of IT is a critical element of your organization. It’s responsible for building and maintaining your data infrastructure – and that’s a big job.
According to IBM, 90% of data on the Internet today was created in the past two years, which equates to 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. By 2020, data amounted to 10.5 zettabytes. Every 14 months, the amount of corporate data worldwide doubles.
With the stats setting a high benchmark on the role of IT, creating a data-driven culture is becoming the new norm. Most importantly, your IT team must be on board and work collaboratively with other parts of the business.
The best approach to achieving and measuring these goals will differ for each business. What is universal is that the business can’t achieve its goals without a partnership with modern report-building software such as dotnetreport.
So how can you leverage the role of IT in fostering a culture as such? Keep reading to find out!
What is Data Analytics Culture?
Data culture is the set of beliefs, values, and practices that underpin an organization’s approach to data. It includes everything from how data is collected and stored to how it is used and shared. A strong data culture is built on a foundation of trust and transparency.
Data is seen as a valuable asset that can be used to improve decision-making, drive innovation, and create competitive advantage. Organizations with a strong data culture are constantly looking for new ways to use data to improve their operations and better serve their customers.
They invest in data-driven technologies and build their data science and analytics capabilities. They also incentivize employees to use data in their work and make data-driven decisions.
Moreover, the role of IT in a data-driven culture can streamline mundane tasks and coordinate marketing, sales, and operations efforts. Better collaboration between teams will result in more consistent products, services, and processes, which can be evaluated to determine what the future market and target audience will need.
As more organizations embrace data culture, it will become increasingly important for businesses to understand and adopt these practices to stay competitive.
Buying a data culture isn’t possible, but you can buy software to help create one. It requires a mix of education, software, and change management to build a data culture. And this is where dotnetreport comes to play.
- The Need for a Strong Data-Driven Culture
According to Forrester’s early research, companies that analyze data to derive insights into their decision-making are twice as likely to experience double-digit growth.
This is supported by an MIT report on CDO and Information Quality Symposium that data-driven cultures result in increased revenue, profitability, customer service, and operating efficiencies.
Moreover, data cultures encourage employee satisfaction – and by extension, employee retention – by fostering a logical work culture. As a result, your workforce becomes more committed to organization decisions, reducing employee resistance to change.
Your chances of getting all stakeholders on board can significantly improve when you back decisions with data and advanced analytics.
- Data Culture Requires Digital Proficiency
An effective digital engagement is measured by digital proficiency. To maximize benefits from technology, individuals must calculate how proficiently they use it. The fact that our lives today are so closely intertwined with technology makes digital literacy a prerequisite in almost every field.
As the world increasingly shifts online, it’s becoming more important than ever for individuals to have digital proficiency. And as data becomes increasingly central to our lives and economy, this digital proficiency must extend to comfort and understanding of working with data.
This shift has given rise to what is known as a ‘data culture.’ Individuals with a data culture can not only work with data but also understand its implications and potential uses. They’re comfortable navigating digital tools and platforms and have a basic understanding of statistical concepts.
In short, they can think critically about data. As our world becomes more and more data-driven, it’s essential that we cultivate a data culture. Only by doing so will we be able to unlock the power of this transformative resource fully.
Stats Fact: Employees with high data literacy feel empowered and trusted to make better business decisions 50% more often than those with low data literacy.
Most executives, however, overestimate data literacy in their organizations. Among C-suite executives, 70% believed employees had the data literacy skills needed to succeed – when only 21% felt confident.
How to Foster a Data-Driven Culture in Your Organization?
Creating a data culture requires a mix of data science and the right skills, training, accessibility, and management from the top down. However, it goes without saying that a strong data culture is built on a solid data infrastructure and incorporates digital proficiency process steps.
This means that data is used to inform decision-making at every level of the organization. A data-driven culture can help an organization to be more agile, responsive, and effective.
There are a few key things that you can do to foster a data-driven culture in your organization.
- Make sure that everyone has access to data. Too often, data is siloed within the organization, making it difficult for people to make decisions based on it.
- Encourage everyone to use data when making decisions. 74% of executives still make business decisions based on their gut even though our heads might tell us to watch the data. This also means training people on how to use data effectively and rewarding those who take data into account when making decisions.
- Make sure that data is accurate and up-to-date. Nothing will undermine confidence in a data-driven culture faster than outdated or inaccurate data.
Taking these digital proficiency process steps into action, you can create a culture in your organization where data is king. It may seem daunting, but if you take incremental steps now, you’ll be on your way to enhancing your business agility and resilience in the future.
For organizations everywhere, dotnetreport has developed a proven methodology for scaling analytics and building data cultures through its ad-hoc reporting.
How can Organizations Build Data Analytics Agility?
The solution lies in adopting agile implementation practices.
Modern BI offers a self-service model of data for everyone, rather than continually collecting requirements and designing reports.
The following are some ways the role of IT can help an organization achieve better outcomes to build data agility:
- A flexible approach to analytics environment support can accommodate growth
As Analytics adoption grows across the business, data agility is becoming increasingly mission-critical for organizations. Therefore, you should check your server utilization more frequently than with other technologies-including, including changing your topology as your organization’s needs change.
Flexible analytics solutions don’t limit you to specific architectures, data sources, or cloud deployments.
Planning and monitoring should be implemented in an agile manner; a ‘set it and forget it’ approach can result in inadequate resources that can’t support enthusiastic users as their data needs continue to grow.
- Support your teams’ business processes by providing tools to help them take action
Employers can integrate data assets into their existing workflows and applications by setting up email notifications, chat alerts, and @mentions or embedding analytics into internal portals and CRMs where employees spend their time.
By automating and applying intuitive AI, we not only help people engage fluidly with contextual analytics in the moment but also speed up the process of solving problems.
Providing employees with effective data questions, accurate answers, and cross-functional collaboration can affect your customers across their entire lifecycle, ultimately enabling them to act on the most relevant data at the right time.
- Align business objectives with strategic goals
To build out your self-service analytics program, identify priority areas and align use cases with them. You can encourage interaction with data and achieve your strategic goals by focusing on your high-priority use cases.
You can seamlessly embed and integrate dotnetreport’s ‘reporting and dashboards’ solution with your application and tech stack.
As a result, your users get a smooth and fast experience accessing their analytics, reports, and dashboards. We strive to improve your stakeholders’ experience by giving them control over their reporting requirements while saving you and your development team time and effort.
With more teams adopting and evolving analytics, the role of IT should define success metrics that reflect business outcomes.
IT Role in Data Governance
The main role of IT in data governance is to ensure that the data agility and quality remains high throughout the complete lifecycle of the data and that the implemented controls align with the organization’s business objectives.
It is important that information is used effectively and efficiently and in line with the company’s intentions. Data governance identifies who can take what action because of what data, in which situations, and using what methods.
A second data governance goal is to prevent data errors entering systems and to block misuse of personal information about customers and other sensitive information.
To achieve that, uniform data use policies can be established, along with procedures for monitoring and enforcing the policies on an ongoing basis.
A data governance framework can also help to strike a balance between data collection practices and privacy legislation.
How does data governance affect data culture?
An organization might be unable to resolve data inconsistencies across systems without effective data governance. Depending on the system, customer names may appear differently in sales, logistics, and customer service.
This could complicate data integration efforts and cause problems with data integrity, affecting BI, enterprise reporting, and analytics applications. BI and analytics accuracy can also be compromised by data errors that are not identified and fixed.
dotnetreport is helping many organizations centralize IT. And with that, manage data centrally to scale, improve productivity, and effectively manage information. Let our team become the helping hand and see results for yourself!
Bottom Line
To survive through crises, companies need to develop greater analytical agility. This means being proactive in detecting trends and responding to new challenges. In the past, companies have been reactive, only responding to crises after they have occurred.
This is no longer enough. Businesses need to be able to anticipate problems and act before they happen. To do this, they need to have a deep understanding of their data and be able to make decisions quickly. They also need to be able to adapt their operations to changing conditions. You can be better equipped to weather any storm by developing these capabilities.
Organizations like yours can benchmark their analytics maturity with Dotnetreport. A formal framework of questions is provided step-by-step guidance on everything from IT strategy and business alignment to agility, proficiency, and community. This way, a powerful tool can make data analytics more extensible.
Ready to put our report builder to work for you? Contact us to schedule a demo and free trial.
