“Data Culture, you say?” 

We live in a digital era, where data and technology are everything. However, since the pandemic, data has become a focal point of corporate culture, now more than ever, thanks to the widespread adoption of remote work. Organizations are rapidly changing their conventional operational methods to newer, more adaptive ways. In the process, we are also understanding the importance of data literacy and having a data culture. To stay ahead of the competition and to stay relevant it is imperative to ensure a consistent and continuous adoption. 

A data culture is one wherein decisions are made based on data rather than intuition. The primary motivation for instituting a data culture in an organization is to enhance the quality of decision-making and empower the decision-makers. In a data culture, logic and empirical evidence take precedence. However, the data must be accessible, reliable, and easily comprehendible before it can be used to guide decision-making.  

Ultimately, an organization needs to enable three capabilities to build a data culture. We refer to these skillsets as the backbone of data culture. Data research, data literacy, and data governance are the three building blocks for a successful data strategy: 

• Data Research: Collecting, observing, generating, and creating data are all examples of research that contribute to the body of knowledge used to verify previous discoveries. Searching for and discovering new information is essential for workers who need it to make decisions now. 

• Data Literacy: It is the capacity to read, write, and convey data in context, including knowledge of data sources and constructions, analytical tools, and procedures, use-case application and consequent business value or outcome. 

• Data Governance: Proper behaviour regarding the valuation, generation, consumption, and control of data and analytics can be ensured by the implementation of a data governance framework, which entails the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework. It entails the proper management of data within an organization to ensure that the right data is used in the right ways by the right people. 

Benefits of Data culture? 

• A data centric culture can aid a company in making quicker and more accurate decisions. Companies with data-driven cultures enjoy increased revenue, superior customer service, best-in-class operating efficiencies, and improved profitability. 

• Fostering a culture that is data-driven can aid in attracting and retaining top talent. 

• Makes it much simpler to implement best practices and courses of actions with controllable outcomes based on past results, which in turn encourages continuous improvement across the organization. 

• Data-driven decision making promotes swifter and, more importantly, fully transparent, and trackable approval processes by team members, which in turn supports high levels of compliance and accountability. 

• Data aids in generating actionable market insight based on real facts and tested statistics. It helps complete market research and support successful business initiatives that may have taken a back seat, by removing the need for speculation and ambiguity. 

• The potential for cost savings afforded by data-driven decisions should never be understated, as should their speed and effectiveness in boosting operational efficiency, laying the groundwork for cost-effective strategies, and ensuring that the most successful of these remain in place over time. 

• This aids everyone in having a thorough understanding of how best to ground decisions in data, drawing attention to best practices and actionable scenarios that can be standardized and spread throughout the company. Eventually, developing a routine of using data to guide decisions can boost service quality and employee engagement. 

It is important for organizations to have access to accurate and secure data and to build a data culture for growth and development. Having the best data analysts and top-of-the-line data infrastructure is not enough to develop a successful data culture. You cannot rely entirely on a high-end customer relationship management program and expect it to magically build a data-driven culture in your firm. Data culture cannot be bought, it must be implemented, incorporated from the top-down as the very essence of the organization, by blending data science with the necessary expertise, training, accessibility, and management. 

About Kanerika
Kanerika is a niche consulting firm building efficient enterprises with deployment of automated, integrated and analytics solutions. Kanerika enables efficient enterprises through its unique digital consulting frameworks and AIOps enabled compostable solution architecture. We partner with some of the top vendors to solve some of the critical data and process related challenges. We help some of the top brands across the globe in increasing their speed to respond in evolving market conditions, reducing their cost of operations, empowering them with the right tools and insights for effective decision making.