3 Steps to Building a Data-Driven Culture

If your organization is like most, then the variety, volume, and velocity of the data you regularly collect is creating challenges when it comes to:

• Leveraging that data to inform business-driving decisions
• Getting real-time data access to everyone in the organization that needs it
• Integrating new datasets in an efficient and cost-effective way

The list doesn’t end there, but it’s clear that the majority of enterprises face challenges when it comes to handling the data they are collecting, particularly when it comes to leveraging that data as the competitive asset it should be. But fully leveraging data as an asset involves more than just technology; it’s about the people who use and ultimately control data and your organization’s overall data culture.

Creating a data-driven culture is a crucial initiative for enterprises looking to fully leverage their data as an asset. Here are three steps that can help your organization get started.

1. Add the Right Skill Sets

As the role of data in an organization continues to evolve, so too do the roles that are impacted with any type of data infrastructure or process change. At Tamr, we’ve identified the key personas that are typically involved in an enterprise’s integrated ‘data supply chain’ — from data suppliers, to data preparers and data consumers. All of these roles are critical to developing a data-driven culture across the organization. Without these specific skill sets in place at an organization, it becomes very difficult to sufficiently scale data delivery and analytics.

2. Address Common Bottlenecks

Traditionally, companies have viewed data as gold that must be kept with its perceived owners within their departments and branches. More often than not, it’s these “data owners” who act as a bottleneck to upgrading and transforming data infrastructure. Why?

• Fear of sharing data: Poor data quality can lead to a fear of sharing data, either because people feel they’re being judged, or else because they are too busy to fix data consumers’ requests. Without sharing, however, quality cannot be improved.
• The need to hoard data: Individuals throughout an organization tend to view data like gold. But data hoarding prevents data from being used to deliver value.
• Ignoring data complexity: Data can be read a number of different ways and generated in idiosyncratic ways. Ignoring these opportunities limits a large enterprise.
• Protecting data by limiting access to it: Controlling data access on a need-to-know-only basis reflects an organization’s uncertainty as it pertains to data quality.

As more and more businesses seek out data solutions, it becomes apparent that these bottlenecks are only holding enterprises back. To be successful, your organization needs to identify the data bottlenecks that serve as obstacles to analytic outcomes and work on removing them.

3. Implement the Right Solutions

This is a unique moment for large organizations in the data operations world. Companies are getting bigger, their data is becoming more robust, and the tools they’ve been using need an upgrade.

These enterprises require:

1. Updated tools and infrastructure to manage data
2. Wholesale migration to the Cloud
3. Disbanded data silos to enable stronger analytics

Businesses are realizing that there’s a lot of data laying around on the ground that can create tremendous value really quickly, but they need a new generation of data tooling in order to truly take advantage of it. Recognizing the opportunity data offers for a corporation is a big first step in creating a data-focused culture. This sort of culture means your company can close the gap between the potential value of their vastly siloed legacy data and the consistent realization of the data’s value by all the people in the organization. This means developers and individual employees on the front lines of the enterprise—not just data scientists and traditional analysts.

Across your organization and its many varied business units, it’s crucial for people to see and understand that data offers an incredible opportunity to answer questions, solve problems, and generate meaning. More than that, sharing that data puts the power of that data in the hands of a much broader population of people—allowing for greater results.

To learn more about effectively creating a data-driven culture at your organization, download our ebook, How to Embrace Data Variety to Deliver Decision-Driving Analytics, below.

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