Organisations are increasingly striving to be data driven, with more data at their disposal than ever before, stored across multiple cloud and on-prem environments. But many technology teams are struggling to manage this stream of data, and crucially, many are missing crucial insights.
Digital transformation is often more than just a technology challenge. Extracting value from data and empowering its use requires engagement from people.
Barriers to success
Silos, a lack of data literacy and a disconnect between data focussed strategy and wider business strategy can create problems for organisations attempting to maximise the impact of their data.
Amidst a global technology talent shortage and mounting costs, relying on specific specialist employees to provide data intelligence limits the time, resources and budget available. To use data operationally and strategically, it must be democratised across all relevant levels of an organisation and compatible with teams operating independently. When strategies and in-the-moment decisions are unable to be based on all the available data, decision-making and consequences suffer.
Complex data ecosystems and evolving environments amplify this problem. Data assets and access controls become intricate, creating visibility challenges that run the risk of data governance and compliance woes. Inconsistencies derail data quality and reliability which further impacts spending and the efficient use of resources.
Powerful tooling and data intelligence are ineffective without meaningful education and underlying processes.
Fostering the culture
Having a clear strategy for data education is key to achieving literacy across the organisation but it can be difficult to approach, outline, and achieve.
Instead of hiring competitive data talent to enable a data-first culture, organisations should empower and enable existing employees to do data analytic work and understand the business benefits of doing so. Through encouraging buy-in across all levels of the organisation, a culture is fostered to ensure different teams have the appropriate literacy level to get the most out of the data at their disposal.
Education programmes allows organisations to remove technical barriers and support people wanting to develop their skills and expertise. After all, they are best equipped to identify potential insights available and how this may help execution of their tasks.
Organisational success is driven by people, not data alone. Employees are responsible for furthering initiatives, prioritising goals, and making decisions. Data insights can unlock opportunity but it is the employees that must then be proactive about extracting this value.
While it is evident companies are investing in technological development, they often neglect to allocate investment to enabling people and processes to become more data driven - making changes to organisational structure, empowering data leaders, and creating data centres of excellence. Organisations must make data-driven decisions a priority, break down information silos to increase data access across every level and regularly upskill employees.
This post was sponsored by Quest
