The Western Digital “Growing Role of Object Storage in Solving Unstructured Data Challenges” study revealed that unstructured data is growing between 40-60% per year. Rich media – audio, video, images, and research data, all of which are non-text data types – are leading the pack of data sources. All of this data falls into the category of unstructured data, or Big Data.
Executives participating in the Accenture study, “Big Success with Big Data” emphasized that to remain competitive companies need to actively embrace Big Data or “face extinction.” This explosion of data and more powerful data analytics-enabling technology has made it ever more imperative for organizations to be able to make faster and better analytically oriented evidence-based decisions.
With so much of today’s data related to customer and market behavior, Marketing organizations are in an excellent position to lead the charge for creating a data-to-insights culture. Organizations that reflect this culture will be better positioned to leverage data to maximize its efforts and optimize Marketing investments. If you want to be able to transform into an analysis-action oriented company, you need to embrace a data-to-insights culture.
This is hard work with a solid pay-off. Data-driven organizations are able to:
- Act and react in a more agile manner.
- Successfully attain business goals
- Maximize their efforts and marketing investments
So what is a data-to-insights culture and how do you create one? Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about culture and then dive how to create the data-to-insights culture.
“Culture” is defined as the socially transmitted behavior patterns that reflect how a group of people operate. It emerges and evolves wherever groups of people congregate. And that’s true of where we work. An organization’s culture reflects the way its workers think, behave, work and interact. It can guide, inspire and motivate or do just the opposite. Culture also affects how well your organization attracts and retains employees, partners, and customers.
You know from experience that organizational cultures vary. For example, perhaps today you’re in an organization where the culture encourages employees to see themselves as family members, with a focus on mentoring, nurturing, and “doing things together.” Another culture might primarily be entrepreneurial, with a focus on risk taking, innovation, and “doing things first.” Perhaps you know of an organization whose culture is results-oriented, with a focus on competition, achievement, and “getting the job done.” Or maybe one that has a more hierarchical culture where process, efficiency, and structure – that is, “doing things right” – are the essential behaviors.
A data-to-insights culture is data driven – a culture that thrives on getting the most out of its analytics-to-action processes. In their Business of Data report, the Economist Intelligence Unit rated companies that are ahead of their competitors in the use of data as three times more likely to be financially successful. These companies rely on data-driven decision-making over intuition or experience. You can tell when you’re in a data-to-insights culture when the organization employs a consistent, repeatable approach to using data to make tactical and strategic decision-making.
