What business admit that is not driven by data?

Even if some argue that most of the business make decisions on intuition at least some understanding of the data is needed such as how much is in the bank, what is the sales ytd, how many staff there are in the books, are we meeting budget.

No one just make decisions on a whim and in my view to some degree all companies are data driven. I agree that some companies use more evidence and are more mature in their process when it comes to managing data to make data driven decisions. Therefore data driven decisions are the norm and I believe that companies that do not act accordingly are short lived.

But wait if all companies are to some level data driven how one can one differentiate?

How data can transform a company and make it more competitive?

So to be clear here. When I said that a company is data driven It means that before a company making a decision or take a path they look at the data to support the decision full stop. Until then there is nothing different in the company strategy and business is managed as usual irrespective it they used pen and paper or a dashboard hosted in the cloud.

The new concept that I wanted to emphasise and that can revolutionise a company is when their business model is data drive i.e. data is the main asset of the company and without it the company cannot exist. A mission woven around data is the very reason of their existence.

Most companies that are just data driven can go about without a Business Intelligence team or even a highly specialized Machine Learning and Software Engineering team that are relentlessly developing new tools and none of that is essential to be data driven. The good old excel and export to csv, copy and paste to word document does the job. This is certainly not the most efficient way but it is certainly feasible and obviously cheaper.

They question is. How long a company can sustain competitivity by just being data driven?

Different to that are business models that are data driven such as Uber, though. The data is vital for the business to function because it is only possible when Uber knows where their customers and drivers are and efficiently adjust supply and demand using algorithms and AI. They simple cannot run the business on pen and paper or even spreadsheets alone.

Amazon, another example, posses the knowledge of customer habits stored in databases and can advertise accordingly as well as develop and test products that are working. It is all based on the data and the platform that runs all automated intelligence. This means that all they do as a business is around their data strategy, infra structure and processes.

The companies that are business model data driven not simply pull data from somewhere somehow analyse and make decisions. This is just data driven. What they do is to build a whole data ecosystem.

It goes beyond the vanilla business intelligence of ingesting data in a warehouse and displaying the data in a Dashboard.

A Business Model Driven by Data has an ecosystem where:

  • Machine Learning is in production in multiples systems at back and front of the house
  • Data integration is streaming and live
  • All Organisational software development happen around the Data Architecture
  • Data Governance is across the board
  • C-Suite is data savvy and have clear understanding of AI its use cases and potential
  • Data Quality is measured
  • There is a presence of multiple analytics stores (beyond vanilla SQL) i.e. Data Lake, No SQL, Columnar etc.
  • There is Data Virtualization and a Common Data Model
  • Doing Predictive Analytics is part of multiple business processes to increase productivity and sales

Which side your company wants to gravitate towards?