Creating a Data-Driven Organization

Chapter 13. Conclusion

Data is the new oil!

Clive Humby, Dunnhumby

What does it mean to be data-driven? You will have noticed that the answer doesn’t lie in having the latest big data technology or a crack team of unicorn data scientists. They will certainly help, but being data-driven isn’t about one particular thing. Instead, as I have argued, it touches upon the whole analytics value chain, indeed thfe whole organization. This is summarized in Figure 13-1.

In Chapters 2 and 3, I covered the bottom layer, the data itself—collecting the right data and collecting the data right. On top of that, you need people with the right skills, tools, and training to make good use of the data.

Certainly this includes the analytics org, but a data-driven organization will be far more inclusive than that and have a much larger user base across the organization.

As I have tried to stress, I believe that everyone in the organization has a role a play. It is a shared responsibility. The core chain runs from analysts, their managers, senior management, data leadership, to the C-Suite and the board. However, in a data-democratized environment where, as Ken Rudin says, “everyone is an analyst,” it is the whole staff’s responsibility to, among other things, make use of the data, tools, and training available, to embed facts into their processes where possible, to report data quality issues, to generate testable hypotheses, to challenge baseless strategies, opinions, and HiPPOs, and generally to ...