You think are driven by data, but data are misguiding you

Adriano Meirinho
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

What companies are now calling data driven is not exactly what that term means. Being data driven is to know how to transform those into actions.

According to the State of Analytics de 2016 research, 86% of the industry workers believe that data are critical for their decision-making processes. Is this the case? What we currently call data-driven is not exactly what being data-driven means.

KPIs, dashboards, online reports, data and more data. These are just data! Few workers actually contextualize their data, and transform those into actions. You may be an expert in gathering numbers, but that will amount to nothing if you don’t know how to use them.

Nowadays the premise of the digital worker is to be data-driven, analytical, data crunch… Yes, everything is neat and marvelous, but what about turning those data into something tangible? In a research conducted by Forrester, 74% of the companies want to be data-driven, but only 29% affirm that they are good when it comes to building a bridge between analyses and actions. In other words, 2 in every 3 companies don’t know how to make data-based actions.

If you have more than 10 macro KPIs in your company, something is wrong. I’m sorry to say that your company suffers from an organizational pathology. You must be part of these 2 companies mentioned above.

Do you really want to know if your company is data-driven? That’s simple: set metrics that can be taken based on them. Before thinking about numbers, before taking the audience into account, set metrics along with your definition of what data collection is. You can only be data-driven if everyone is aligned with a central metric, if every single person has access to data they need and if everyone is capable of extracting insights from these data.

One tip: if you have some KPI in your company from which it is unfeasible to extract any sort of insight or turn it into an action, then delete it! It’s not that much of a help and it clogs your spreadsheets and misguides your current actions.

Also from the State of Analytics 2016 research, 60% of the people affirmed that they have 2 or more analytics tools. For what? Certainly their functionalities are not being fully used in order to justify their costs. An analytics tool properly chosen is enough already to make sure that everyone in the company can have access to data and extract useful insights from it. The greater the number of tools or different databases, the greater the chances of error!

I’m not going to even mention those “manipulated” KPIs. An example of this is the Multi Attribution Model in digital marketing. Cross data is so extensive that what should indicate the sources of where the best results are coming from, actually makes data analysis even more confusing. If every marketing professional shapes their allocation of resources according to where the result appears to be prettier, that’s already a poor starting point. It’s a way of presenting good-looking data for weak results. Stay out of this, be critical and take actions based on data and metrics that matter.


Adriano Meirinho the CMO and co-founder of Celcoin, a financial services application for those who do not have a bank account. A Marketing Executive with a MBA Degree in Retail Management from FIA-USP and a certification as a Practitioner in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), Meirinho has more than 18 years of experience in marketing and advertising, having been part of important companies, such as Oppa and Catho On-line, where he received six Top Of Mind awards from 2006 to 2012 and three Ibest awards, in 2002 and 2004.

)

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade