Why Digital Businesses Need to Be Data-Driven

Pratik Barjatiya
Data And Beyond
Published in
8 min readJan 8, 2020
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A revolutionary change is happening in society and it involves data science. Everybody, from small scale companies to global enterprises, began to realize the potential knowledge of data science and is seeing the worth in digitizing their data assets and becoming data-driven.

It is quite common lately to seek out CEO’s, CTO’s, CMO’s and analysts quoting ‘data’ as the next big thing within the industry. As a result of increased Data and AI awareness, many established companies have commenced targeted Data and AI initiatives with big expectations to show around the business and attract star talent. However, a few years into the programs, many show signs of fatigue and unmet expectations from senior managers and leaders unhappy with the speed of progress. Pilots are made in selected areas and even data-enabled products are launched, but the desired large-scale business transformation has not taken place. Data and AI are still niche activities, not the premise for business. In some cases, people whisper about “the project which must not be named.” As a result, management grows increasingly impatient and wonders how to get out of the rut.

This brings to the real question — how can we leverage this resourceful data into a model that’s capable of assessing data capabilities and leverage its potential for business influence and business growth.

The reality is that there are no shortcuts, few answers how to harness data capabilities are demonstrated by FANG, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google all used very different business strategies to realize their current market dominance and global influence, but their common success is arguably their foresight in understanding the worth of data and positioning themselves early. They worked from the inside out, placing continuous emphasis on capability building, alongside developing, testing and deploying the highest technologies internally, in order that they might offer the best to their customers.

If we discuss for established, non-digital companies the road is even rockier. Traditional businesses have established ways of working, digitally immature staff and legacy infrastructure. Overcoming those matters involves for strong determination and persistence across leadership transforming to digital path. It means bringing Data and AI into the core of all aspects of decision making — from strategy to operations, supported by (KPI) Key Performance Indicators that align data-driven decision making. This calls the need of becoming a Digital Data Driven company

Sometimes the leadership understands the importance of becoming Data and AI driven, but feels inadequate in their own knowledge about the subject matter. That is a good sign. Many universities and consultancies offer Data and AI training for business leaders. An effective way is to custom-tailor a Data and AI workshop as part of the leadership strategy days.

A word of warning: Sometimes business leaders make the error to specialize in statistics, computer science, and coding in their desire to enhance their understanding of AI. While coding is a critical skill for Data Scientists and Data Engineers, business leaders are better off putting their efforts into creating an effective company environment for Data and AI, meaning setting business goals, hiring the right talents, educating the workforce, committing to investments, and implementing an efficient operating model and organization for Data and AI. This is often best done by setting clear goals and incentives for the organization and following abreast of them.

What is Data-driven
The data-driven company combines data, analysis and insights to answer the question of “what next?” Through the utilization of data knowledge at every level, in every part of the organization, the data-driven company adopts data as a strategic resource. We’ll often observe things like this in a data-driven organization:

  • Based on the data, we should increase/decrease investment in Y areas in upcoming quarter by X%.
  • Our analysis of why our X marketing campaign failed indicates our campaign wasn’t mobile-friendly, all future campaigns will be responsive in design.
  • When asked, our customers told us they hate our green product color; through testing and surveying, a muted blue color will prove to be more customer-friendly.

The choices made by data-driven organizations encapsulate the data info, what happened, why, and what next in clean, concise statements which indicate the subsequent action to be taken. Data may be a key strategic currency that powers every major decision made in a truly data-driven organization, every planning meeting begins with data, and no decision is executed without a governance structure to gather and measure the choice.

Becoming data-driven

The evolution of a corporation into a data-driven organization begins with entrepreneurial efforts, but at the at the top of the method requires adoption throughout the organization. Without buy-in at every level, a corporation cannot become truly data-driven.
That said, albeit a whole company doesn’t become data-driven, you as a private stakeholder can adopt data-driven practices to enhance the part of the organization you’ve got control over. This also map your career as you become a data-driven professional.

How to get started

  • Setup Robust Data Collection — Data Processing — Data Security & Data Compliance — Data Storage Framework readily available with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM,etc. One can setup in-house solutions shared below or partner cloud service providers
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  • An AI-fueled business intelligence platform that supports the entire analytics cycle, from discovery to operationalization.
    Visualize, analyze and share actionable insights about your data with anyone in your organization. A data pipeline described below works best to kick start BI
  • An integrated analytics planning CRISP-DM methodology based solution to promote collaboration across the organization and help keep pace with the speed of modern business. With a powerful calculation engine, this enterprise performance management solution helps you move beyond the limits of spreadsheets, automating the planning process to drive faster, more accurate results. Simplify oceans of data by unifying data sources into one single repository and empowering users to build sophisticated, multidimensional models that drive more reliable forecasts.
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Data Cultural Shift [CRISP-DM Adoption]

Including new specialized structures, libraries and devices isn’t the sole change that must happen once you attempt to make an organization that is more information driven. An increasingly significant and a lot harder move is social data-culture. Changing what people look like and treat data might be a key perspective that is extremely testing. Here are a couple of reasons why —

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

  • There are three types of lieslies, damn lies, and statistics. If it were as basic as simply getting yields and p-values. At that point information researchers, data scientist would be out of business on the grounds that there are many third-party solutions and products that find the simplest algorithm and do feature selection for you. However, that is not the sole occupation of a data driven decision scientist or choice researcher. They’re there to scrutinize each p-value and truly test the why of the sum they’re seeing.
  • This is frequently why simply having numbers isn’t ok . Units additionally need to have a fair senese of the business and hence the procedure to make said data information to ensure they don’t permit information that is untidy into the tables which analyst, the investigators use straightforwardly.

Information Is As yet Chaotic

  • In all honesty, information is still extremely chaotic. Indeed, even with the present current ERPs and applications, information is chaotic and now and then awful information gets past that can misdirect data administrators an examiners.
  • This can be because of a great deal of reasons. How the applications oversee information, how framework administrators of those applications changed said framework, and so on. Indeed, even changes that appear to be irrelevant from a business procedure side can significantly affect how information is put away.
  • Thusly, when information engineers are pulling information they may not precisely be speaking to information in light of awful suppositions and restricted information.

Our perspective should be that data analysts need confidence that the info they’re watching correctly represents their corresponding businesses processes. If analysts need to remove any data, or consistently perform joins and where clauses to accurately represent the business, then the info isn’t “self-service”. This is often why, whenever data engineers create new data models, they have to figure closely with the business to form sure the right business logic is collected and represented within the base layer of tables.

Conclusion

At the top of the day, creating an efficient data culture requires a both top down and bottom up shift in thinking. From the chief level, decisions got to be made in what key areas they will help make access to data easier. Then teams can start performing at becoming better at actually using data to form decisions. we frequently find most teams spend an excessive amount of time performing on data tasks that require to urge done but might be automated.

Being data driven as an association suggests that you need to develop a culture that attempts to look at estimations and estimations and certifications there is nothing interfering with the number. Most estimations and bits of knowledge every now and again have a couple of stipulations that could invalidate whatever message they are endeavoring to state. That is the explanation making a culture that looks estimation and asks about why is a bit of the methodology.

Improving your approach to data can provide an out-sized competitive advantage and permit your analysts and data scientists the power to figure on projects they both enjoy and help your bottom line!

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Pratik Barjatiya
Data And Beyond

Data Engineer | Big Data Analytics | Data Science Practitioner | MLE | Disciplined Investor | Fitness & Traveller