Every day, the world produces 5 exabytes of data. By 2025, we will produce data at a rate of 463 exabytes per day. Insights from this data can help companies understand exactly what their customers want, as well as inform a company’s processes and activities. Data can reveal whether you’re moving in the right direction, which areas can be improved, and how you might implement those improvements.
Still, with all the data available to companies today, Forrester reports that 73% of corporate data goes unused for analytics and is rarely shared across the enterprise.
Why does data-sharing matter?
Leveraging data within your organization has the potential to deliver value in many areas. It can help lower costs and increase profits while also reducing risk. Pivoting to a data-driven approach will allow your organization to anticipate changes and challenges more effectively and accurately.
Insights derived from real-world data will allow you to look farther into the future. Customers openly provide insights to help brands understand their wants and needs. With an integrated data strategy, you’ll be able to set solid, measurable goals several years into the future and transform your business, through:
- Personalized customer experiences. Your communication, products, and services will be tailored to your customers based on insights derived from data, which leads to greater customer satisfaction.
- Improved decision-making. Key processes will be optimized, allowing you to make smarter decisions faster.
- Improved efficiency. Automate time-consuming manual tasks, which reduces costs and ensures more accurate results.
- Stronger cybersecurity. Using AI-driven data limits the scope and impact of potential cyberattacks by identifying potential vulnerabilities before they become issues.
- Ambitious social goals. Greater insight into your organization’s data won’t merely benefit you financially. It also helps identify new opportunities, such as increasing diversity or pursuing sustainable business practices more effectively.
So, how do you ensure your data is shared and leveraged?
Here are tips to make your data more discoverable, pervasive, and reusable across the company:
- Foster a culture of “data-sharing” vs. “data ownership.” Data that resides only within one department must be analyzed and shared more broadly across the leadership team. To do this, you must foster a culture of “data-sharing” versus “data ownership.” We recommend creating data stewards who are responsible for company-wide dissemination of all insights.
You will also need to gain Leadership buy-in to remove the inherent obstacles to data sharing. Within your IT department, distinguish your data management strategy between data warehouses, data lakes and data hubs. This will help prevent silos.
- Heighten accountability with a data ecosystem strategy.With increased transparency into your data comes greater accountability. When you create a data ecosystem with clear expectations around the purpose of data sharing across all departments, it’s helpful to have a single leader who is entrusted with the oversight of company-wide data sharing.
Often, CIOs or Chief Data Officers can fill this gap while addressing privacy concerns, ethics and cybersecurity. This leader can establish the expectations for data-sharing, including what data should be shared internally, what data should be sourced from partners and how to align the insights from the total ecosystem for a model that works best for all teams. In some cases, your agency partner can help establish this strategy with your data leaders.
- Embrace unwelcome insights. Data analyses often challenge conventional assumptions about your customers’ wants and needs, including changes to the journey. This can mean your data reveals information that leaders don’t necessarily want to hear. But, as the saying goes, you cannot change what you don’t know. View all new insights as an opportunity to transform your business processes or user experiences.
Meanwhile, Many brands struggle with existing analytics solutions. According to Gartner, only 12% have the ability to collect online data at an individual level, and though 65% of brands report using digital analytics software, more than half (53%) say they’re not completely satisfied with their current solution.
At Acronym, we employ 40 billion data points daily and offer our Clients custom dashboards to ensure these insights are easily digestible and can be applied across the entire organization.
If you need assistance with your data ecosystem strategy, contact us today. Our Analytics teams are standing by.
