Right now, it seems like every company is saying they use AI (Artificial Intelligence) in some fashion. Soon, when you ask your little old grandmother how she makes such a good cup of hot chocolate, don’t expect to hear “with love”, but rather “with AI”.

However, just like AI, data was the hot word and companies still can’t stop getting enough of it. Decades ago “data” was the hot word to use. Companies touted their use of data for a competitive advantage and from data spurred other words like “automation”, “business intelligence”, and “machine learning”. Even though companies might have lots of “data”, if a data-driven culture is not truly present, then I would argue that the data isn’t being used correctly or to its full potential. For instance, long ago, I taught a coworker how to use a pivot table in excel. A week later, she said that our data was “automated” because now all she has to do is update the data, change the pivot table range, run it and copy and paste the results into a new tab….I don’t fault my coworker, I fault the organization for not fostering a data-driven culture.

A data-driven culture in an organization is one that makes evidence based decisions. This does not mean data OR gut feelings, but rather that IF there is evidence, it will be used to make a decision. A lot of times, companies hope that they have data that might have precious insights in it. That is like saying you may have precious metals in a landfill. Sure, you may, but most likely you don’t because that’s not what a landfill is used for. Instead, if you focus on a business problem and collect data around that, you’ll most likely have the data you’re looking for.

So why does a data-driven culture matter? Culture in an organization dictates how problems are solved. By focusing on data, which enables evidence based decisions, we can encourage a culture of testing. Through testing, we get closer to product-market fit, better UX designs, etc. Additionally, by using evidence, we can remove bias. We can double down on what is proven to work rather than what someone just believes. This is what creates a competitive advantage for companies. For example, if you have two companies that make the same thing and have the same resources, the one that has a better culture has the competitive advantage. By having a data-driven culture that encourages innovation and testing, that company will win. Gut feelings are cool and all, but data is better. There have been too many times I have seen decisions shut down just because one person “doesn’t believe the data”. If we are to have a data-driven culture, we need to be data people.

Furthermore, it is not enough to only use data, but a data-driven culture measures results of decisions to determine the magnitude of the effect. We need to measure and share results to learn and progress. Similar to Agile development, we need to work in sprints where data is used for decision making, tested, measured, shared and recorded for next time.

Having a data-driven culture is the goal, but data people need the right tools to reach it. Domo is that particular tool. A barrier to data people fostering a data-driven culture is having barriers to the goal. One of the biggest barriers is the type of tools and technology your organization uses, which is why Domo is great. Domo allows data people to easily connect to data to bring it in via username and passwords instead of needing to know how to code webhooks, APIs and using JSON code. Here are some reasons why Domo enables data-driven culture for data people:

Take some introspective time to really reflect. Here are some questions you should ask yourself and your team:

If you want to discuss or would like an audit of your company’s data infrastructure, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at John.Le@dashboarddudes.com.