Building a Data Driven Organisation at Beamery

Creating a data driven organisation does not (sadly) occur overnight

Many companies make the mistake, whereby they think that in having multiple dashboards populating TV screens on their walls or generating a plethora of reports, they are now data driven. Whilst dashboards and reports are an intricate element of a data driven organisation, they are typically backwards looking. This is not to imply that dashboards and reports are regressive, but it is to highlight that they are descriptive in nature. They describe where one was, they do not provide recommendations of where one is to go next.

The forward looking analysis embraced and enacted upon by a data driven organisation involve answering the W-Questions; those of “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, and “why”. The W-Questions enable the making of recommendations and predictions, they allow the telling of a story around the findings which the dashboards and the reports describe.

The transition from a descriptive outlook to a predictive outlook requires the collection and processing of the correct data. Quoting from Creating a Data-Driven Organisation by Carl Anderson:

“ … such insights require collecting the right data, that the data is trustworthy, the analysis is good, that the insights are considered in the decision, and that they drive concrete actions so the potential can be realised.”

Carl describes this sequence as the analytics value chain and places notable emphasis on the final link, that of driving concrete actions such that their potential can be realised. This is what it means to create a data driven organisation; a data driven culture. If the analyses results are not taken seriously, if they are not acted upon by those whom make the decisions, then they will be ineffectual and a waste of time. For a company to be data driven then the processes and the culture must be in place to drive critical business decisions as a result of these analyses.

Creating a data driven culture at an organisation is a non-trivial task due to it being a multi-faceted problem. It involves the collection of high quality data and the sharing of that data, the hiring and training of data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists, the succinct and effective communication of the analyses, the building and organisation of analytical structures, the defining and designing of metrics and key performance indicators, the setup of A/B testing environments, and the implementation of data driven decision making processes.

The Roadmap to a Data Driven Organisation

Creating a data driven organisation does not (sadly) occur overnight. It is a complicated process with many moving parts. In the series that follows, we will explain how exactly we built a data driven organisation at Beamery from start to finish. The series will consist of the following:

• Defining the Metrics and Key Performance Indicators of the internal teams (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, HR, QA, Design and Engineering)
• Investigating and Understanding the Appropriate Recording and Tracking Tools
• Investigating and Understanding the Appropriate Data Visualisation Tools
• Engineering a Business Intelligence Solution [with Dashboards]
• Creating a Data Driven Culture