Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. — Albert Einstein
Your company generates a treasure trove of data every day.
Sales figures, customer service interactions, fruitful conversations with clients, website visits, emails, and on and on. And don’t forget about the wealth of relevant client, competitor, and strategic partner market data produced by third parties that comes in all sorts of forms and sizes, structured and unstructured.
Let’s face it — you are suffering from information overload. And if you know one thing about data you know it can be downright mesmerizing.
You know what I’m talking about. Afternoons spent intensely gazing into a bottomless abyss of valuable information — thrilled by the discovery of so many meaningful insights but not really sure what it all means and what to do with it.
Chances are there are countless opportunities hiding in your data that will go unnoticed. Which is why you need a prioritized action plan for managing information. There are three steps that will help you formulate a plan for using data to drive better decision-making across your organization.
- Define what you are trying to solve for.
What information is mission critical for different functional areas of your organization? How will or do you collect and store this information? What control limits should be established around these measures? What is the reporting protocol?
- Develop an uncomplicated means for identifying and extracting meaningful insights from the vast amounts of data you generate, accumulate, and store.
How will the data be accessed? Who needs access? What are the critical indicators defining opportunities or threats to your performance objectives? What technologies do you need to accomplish your objectives? How will information be communicated to the organization in order to inspire and motivate the appropriate action?
- Do not underestimate the value of people, experience, intuition, and critical thinking in mining insights that can be transformed into workable solutions that capitalize on real and meaningful business opportunities.
Cultivating a data-driven decision-making culture requires development plans for the teams involved in the process. Who are the key members? What skills do they need? How can those skills be enhanced? How will you teach managers how to be more data-centric? How will you include clients and customers in the process?
Most companies operate under a DYOD (Define Your Own Data) paradigm, where functional groups and leaders analyze data they think is important to their particular piece of the operation with little or no cross-function relevance. Think about all of the time you have invested listening to department heads cogitate over numbers and figures with little or no understanding of how they impact the short- and long-term performance of the business.
Fortunately, there are proven methodologies and customizable technology solutions available to help you navigate through the process. Just keep in mind it begins and ends with knowing what is important, which means you need a prioritized plan of action from the onset.
MindMeld offers a patented, proprietary, search solution capable of aggregating and mining structured and unstructured data with equal efficiency and effectiveness. To learn more contact Doug Knuth at doug.knuth@mindmeldmarketing.com.