All roads lead to data now. There’s an enormous quantity of data created in the world and it’s growing at an exponential rate. Even now, we make around 1.2 trillion searches in Google alone per year. As per estimates, by the year 2020, around 1.7 megabytes of new data will be created in each second for every human being on the planet.

In such a scenario, there is no way businesses can ignore the power of big data. Nothing can help your business like analysing the data accumulated with relevance to your business.

On the other hand, ninety percent of the most successful companies in the world now agree to the fact that the culture of analytics is critical for their success. Data analytics is helping them in framing efficient business strategies leading to favourable operational outcomes.

So what does culture of analytics mean? It is the dedicated process in which the employees take advantage of data and insights to reach to pragmatic business decisions and activities. The culture of analytics helps teams to come up with innovative solutions for the existing problems and drive better outcomes in the business.

However, establishing the culture of analytics in your firm is a long process. It will require a special process which will take time. And there should be technological support as well.

If you’re ready to introduce the culture of analytics in your firm, here are a few pointers to help you reach the goal:

Quality of data

As said earlier, we live in the times of data floods. And there’s a struggle to find the relevant data for your business. To start with a data-driven culture, you should ensure the data you accumulate is clean, reliable and accurate. The data mining techniques should be efficient enough to give you relevant results.

When there is a lack of quality in the data accumulation, your team will hardly trust it. And it can result in the failure of the whole process. For establishing a data-driven culture in the organisation, the first step is to make sure the data engineers come up with clean and accurate data.

Give access to data and insights

Your employees may find it confusing if you introduce them to the data modelling and processing methods. Instead, give them access to the data and insights derived out of it.

Also, give access to the high quality data objects like the KPI’s, statistics, widgets, visualization etc. with relevance to the concerned team. You can also include real-world business examples to encourage them to think in a data-driven manner. Thus, you can empower them to evaluate their business decisions using data insights and apparently move to the ‘culture of analytics.’

Choose the right analytics tools

In surveys related to implementing data and analytics, most of the employees find ‘too much unanalyzed data’ a reason to stay away from switching to a data-driven culture. Therefore, you need to choose the right tools to make the process easier for the team.

There is no dearth of data mining techniques and data analytics tools these days. However, having each of it at your disposal does not make sense. The tools may seem to be similar outward, but may differ in their features and functionalities. Choose the tools wisely with an aim to make the whole process simpler for the team and relevant for your business.

Increase awareness about data and analytics

Unless they are aware and clear about data and analytics, your employees will not be enthused to follow the data-driven decision making process. Introduce different methods to increase the awareness of data analytics. For example, let the terminologies like KPI, metrics etc. become day-to-day words used in your organizational culture.

Or why not think of an analytics dictionary which includes the terminologies used in data science and analytics courses? Or you can introduce educational activities and events to make them learn the potential and benefits of data and analytics. This way, you can help your team to gain awareness and come to terms with the new culture in the organization.

Measure the change!

Finally, do not forget to measure the overall response and change in culture inside the organization. Take feedback and suggestions from the teams. Encourage employees to ask for more data points as well as new queries. Let them submit ideas too.

Before winding up the article, here’s quick note – everyone has enormous quantity of data. But the winner is the one who has the capability, knowledge and tools to use it effectively and take advantage of it. Hence, it’s worth the effort you put in to imbibe a data-driven culture in your organization. When data, technology and mindset are in the right place, you can expect wonders in your business.