In 2016, it was found that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Since then, new devices, sensors and technologies continued to emerge, accelerating the data growth rate even further.

It is clear that in today’s world, data has earned itself a highly critical role. Companies with a solid data-centred strategy in place have greatly disrupted the transportation, entertainment, tourism and financial sectors in recent years. They were seen to have attained significant business benefits within months, and to have continued enjoying them even in future years.

It isn’t solely about strategy however. It is also about transforming behaviours and mind-sets in the corporate culture – and it needs to start at the very top.

KPMG in Malta member firms have witnessed a number of failed activities just because the data and related technologies were procured, implemented and available, but no one understood the benefits and used them. As KPMG International’s most recent global CEO survey made clear, 67 percent of executives still trust their own instincts over the data they receive. On the other hand – companies with a data-driven mindset have achieved measurable business benefits within months and continued enjoying them sustainably in the upcoming years.

What people do matters more than what they say or believe. Therefore, in order to obtain more positive influences from your cultural situation, you should start working on changing the most critical behaviours. Key to this is ensuring that everyone is framing the objectives and requirements of analytics projects correctly.

The starting point is the routine identification of pain points, describing in detail the impact, consequences and emotions.  Contextualisation of how the problem relates to business objectives will then lead to hard metrics that are used to determine success or failure of the analytics project. 

Based on the available data, determination of targeted analytics techniques - ranging from standard business intelligence and data visualisation tools to advanced statistics and machine learning - completes the proper framing of an analytics project.

Behaviours will then drive organisational acceptance of the new data paradigm, by instilling confidence in the employee’s ability to impact business outcomes through data-informed decision-making.

In KPMG’s experience, with appropriately selected projects, results are clear immediately, with clients seeing:

• Improvements in sales figures.
• Improvements in customer experience ratings.
• Championing of digital data strategies, as a guiding force for the business, across departments within the organisation. 

More and more, companies have begun to realise that the only way to stay competitive in a world where huge amounts of data are produced and collected, is to implement data-driven cultures within their organisation.  Using a few high visibility, high impact projects as catalysts to drive the right behaviours before applying analytics across the company, will help build an understanding of the merits of the data-driven approach.

What is the uptake of data analytics in your organisation? Follow this link to access our online assessment!