Why grow in data maturity?
Every company pays lip service to data.
“Do you want to understand your customers better?” — YES
“Do you want to run a more efficient operation?” — YES
“Do you want to do more with data to reach those goals?” — YES
Those conversations typically result in talking about the power of AI and the huge potential of all the data that the company has. Everybody agrees data is important and they should do more with it. Yet, few companies actually put in the effort to increase their data maturity. It’s a bit like having a healthy body. Everybody wants it. Only a few people want to work for it.
So why boost your Data Maturity?
Well, that’s a good question. And organisations should have a hard and honest look at themselves to answer that question. Not every company needs to grow in data maturity or be “AI-enabled”. However, there is plenty of research that shows that those companies who DO invest in data and AI, see reduced costs, increased revenues and more innovative products. This recent survey by McKinsey shows that strong performers attribute up to 20% of their EBIT to AI initiatives.
Data is at the heart of the digital transformation. When thinking about WHY you should grow in data maturity, I like to share this graph from Microsoft:
Every business has 4 essential components: Customers, Operations, Products and People. Great organisations perform well at all four components, and maybe even excel at one of them. Although you can’t excel at all of them according to this theory. But that’s a topic for another blog.
The only way to improve in anything is to try something out, capture data, analyse results and make more informed decisions. If you don’t know why customers are buying your product, it’s hard to improve them. If you don’t know where the bottleneck is in your operations, you will likely not optimise it. All improvements begin with collecting the right data. But they don’t end there.
But you’ll have to work for it.
Yes, growing in data maturity is going to require a lot of discipline, and consistent efforts. Doing one-off pilots in AI is just like going to the gym once, for free. You feel all your muscles burning, but you won’t have created any lasting impact. Here’s the kind of effort you can expect:
- Rethink roles and responsibilities: Having data only in the data or IT department, is like having one department responsible for sending out all emails. Every business unit in your organisation needs to work with data. And they need to be given the autonomy and tooling to be able to do so. Self-service goes way further than giving them the ability to design dashboards.
- Break down information silos: More often than not, business units are protective about their data and rather not share it with other departments. They are afraid the wrong conclusions will be drawn, or the raw data will make them look bad. You need to overcome this barrier at all cost
- Train your people and invest in talent: With ever more data at our disposal at an ever increasing velocity, copy-pasting formulas around in Excel often doesn’t cut it anymore. To really build a deep understanding of what’s going on in the data, people should become familiar with the basics of SQL, ML modelling and using dashboarding tools. No data science degree is necessary. But it helps if some of your team members are comfortable with these tools. They might not even be afraid to write a few lines of code and use a terminal.
- Build out scalable infrastructure in the cloud: On-premise tooling has shown its limitations in terms of flexibility, scalability and cost. People need to experiment, launch ideas, wrangle data, play around with dashboards. Their needs evolve quickly and so does their data. You can’t go through a long IT procurement cycle for each piece of data innovation launched in your company
- Create a realistic and aligned data roadmap: Last but not least, it should be clear by everyone in the organisation why you invest in data, and how you plan to concretely create value in the coming weeks, months and years. Don’t put that time horizon of money creation too far out, or people will lose their patience along the way.
There is plenty of work down the road. But if you get the above items in place, you’re already outperforming 80% of organisations out there. In order to really win, you need to grow in data maturity. If you want to know how you can do that exactly, stay tuned for the next blog post.
Are you curious to find out how data mature your company is and which steps you need to take to improve your data maturity? Take our Data Maturity Scan and gain insights into how data mature your organisation is and on which categories your company scores well. Together with these scores, you will receive our Data Maturity Index that will further explain each of these categories.
Link to scan: https://dataminded.typeform.com/to/Nn0G8uPd
Shout-out to the authors of the Data Maturity Index: Jonny Daenen, Bruno Coussement and Geert Van den Broeck. Thanks for your great contributions!
