From the C-suite to the front lines, almost one in two people in my organization now use advanced data visualization tools to inform their decision-making. How long did this amazing achievement take? 

Seven years.

Does this seem like an eternity to you? 

Let’s look at four key facets of any organization and how moving them from barriers to opportunities can yield a data-driven enterprise in your world.

1. Process: from startups to enterprises

Every organization has its own challenges for managing data. Young, growing organizations spend less time understanding the process and keeping track of changes in process while trying to build up a source of truth. They’re often too focused on just surviving and growing to actively pursue opportunities from data. On the other hand, siloes can exist within large global organizations, which can’t afford to build exceptions for every process. What unites both types of companies is the necessity of process. If you don’t have a centralized process or a way to track changes to it, you have no foundation to be data-driven.

Your unique requirements should inform how you approach your data. Culture ideally is driven both from the bottom up, where analysts are building some kind of an insight that is going to help the manager above them, and from the top down, where an executive who needs visibility on how their businesses are performing gets their questions answered.    

2. Culture: start at the top

The success of almost one in two people within SiteMinder now using data to inform their decision-making stems from our company’s growth trajectory. In order for us to grow at the pace we wanted, we knew we could only get there if we used data to manage and understand our performance. And because our executives were very clear on the opportunities they wanted to pursue, they helped to drive a data culture across the organization. 

3. People: make it easy and intuitive

Having a culture focused on data and centralized processes won’t work if the data is hard to consume. Creating opportunities from data requires a people-centric strategy based on showing insights that are easily consumable. If someone requires more than five minutes to understand what a report or a visualization is telling them, they’re not likely to come back. So, focus on your visualizations and ensure that each one is customized to the way people want to look at things – whether in marketing, sales, or finance. Once you do that, it becomes much easier for your stakeholders to start understanding the insights and make decisions using those insights. Ever so slowly, you’ll start to see all those spreadsheet programs shutting down. Plus, it means that no one talks about “your number” versus “my number” anymore.

4. Organization: how it all comes together

Here’s one view of how a data-driven organization works. At the start of every day, with a coffee in one hand and his iPad in the other, our CEO receives a visualization that gives him key insights and business intelligence, clearly stacked up, into every business unit.

But he isn’t alone. Our teams, from VPs on down, have their own operational reporting, and each person knows how the numbers were derived. It’s therefore much easier to get on a call and explain what happened in their business unit and how that links to the strategy. I haven’t seen a spreadsheet brought into a meeting for a very long time. 

Evolving in time with the organization

What connects and drives all four of these elements is data itself. Therefore it’s vital to remember a few things.

  • Businesses evolve every day. How you tracked a business four years ago should be different than how you track it now, because you’ve grown. 
  • There is no single way of looking at things. Maybe you had ten factors that were driving your business four years back. Today there might be 20 and in a year as many as 30. Stay flexible with that evolution.
  • Different teams and geographies have different data needs, so your visualizations have to keep changing as well. The parameters that you used to track your performance three years back aren’t the same parameters you’ll be using going forward.

Nothing in a business should be static. The same is true for data and how we analyze and present it. It has to keep evolving every year as the business grows and new parameters arise to take advantage of data-driven opportunities. Remember: if we don’t keep up, people may go back to spreadsheets.