Image source: Pexels.
We live in a digital age. The fact that we have such advanced technologies has been our saving grace amidst the global lockdowns. More and more enterprises all over the world are coming up with tech-driven ways to make the most out of our transformed post-pandemic world.
But more than just our tools and tech, our teams need to adapt alongside. When we enable a “data-driven” culture, we enable ourselves to truly make strategic decisions.
What you'll find in this article
Importance of a Data-Driven Culture
But what exactly do we mean when we call a culture “data-driven?”
In this information age, data is everything. There’s data in customer demographics, contact information, sales data, even in traffic statistics for business websites—our modern world is one teeming with all this useful data. But data is just that; raw numbers and figures. Data isn’t what tells you what to do; it’s people who are equipped with the skills and know-how to interpret that data and to transform it into strategy.
A data-driven culture is one that realizes and recognizes the importance of organizing and processing data to guide the company’s decision making. Here are a few among many other ways a data-driven culture can benefit your business:
Building a Customer-Centered Approach
Understanding the customer is key to a booming business. A data-driven business that’s equipped with the tools to better understand customer trends and behaviors will always be one step ahead in this regard.
Turn Data into Revenue
One of the many ways a data-driven culture can benefit your business is by turning data into revenue. By utilizing existing intelligent systems, businesses the world over can take raw numbers and turn it into opportunities for greater revenue.
Creating Market Advantages
Competition is everywhere and everything to a business. The way a data-driven culture can help you there is by helping you create market advantages for yourself, by always being one step ahead of the competition by being able to predict trends, forecast customer behavior, and adapt to market changes.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is exactly what we mean when we talk about turning raw data into insight.
You cannot make use of raw business data; you need experts equipped with the skills to pick it apart and piece together steps for data-driven decision making. In the same manner, you cannot have a data-driven culture without factoring in business intelligence and all the tools and strategies attached to data analysis.
More and more, as companies adopt newer tech, data analytics tools and business analysis services are spreading like wildfire.
Microsoft Power BI
Figure 1: MS Power BI logo
Power BI is one such business analytics service offered by Microsoft. We all know Microsoft, right? The same company that brought us industry standards like Word, Powerpoint, and Excel?
Microsoft is back at it again with Power BI, their answer to the growing demand on business intelligence. Have you ever looked at a spreadsheet and thought it’d be so much easier if the numbers were presented in neat, interactive formats? Or have you ever needed a progress report made on sales quotas? Or have you ever wanted to be guided by data in making strategic marketing decisions?
Those are exactly what Power BI was made for, and so much more.
How Power BI Boosts Business
Power BI is a reporting tool and business intelligence service that allows you to create visualizations and models of data that can be taken from numerous sources.
If you have raw data from MS Office applications like Excel or other databases whether cloud-based or on-premise, Power BI is built to sift through it all and turn the task of making charts, diagrams, graphics, and drill-downs into one that takes all but the press of a couple switches.
But exactly what kind of perks might this service have in store for enterprises across the globe?
Seamless Collaboration
Even long before this age of data, collaboration between teams has been a make-or-break for business. Working within the workspace with different files and reports, and then needing to sort those files and reports after-the-fact—hellish!
Power BI cuts the tide and allows seamless organizational collaboration. You can make, distribute, and manage the same files between team members all without the usual disruptions! Updates become easier to do when there’s hassle-free cloud-based systems between teams.
Cloud Intelligence
Speaking of cloud-based systems, Power BI offers this and so much more. Power BI is equipped with AI with cloud computing capabilities that can give your team visualizations and models proceed in real-time, all completely shareable between different users.
Data Transformation
Data transformation is a very lengthy process of converting data from one form to another, often also involving codifying that data. Power BI allows you to skip right through that process and go straight from data discovery to data review.
Power BI is able to do this by virtue of many things, chief among them its connectors to support platforms including Microsoft Dynamics, Google Analytics, and so many more.
Data Narrative
One thing that needs to be talked about more often in business spheres is the need to spell out a narrative from your data.
Dashboards can tell you what’s going on—numbers can show the rate of clicks or traffic on a website. But to know why, and to be guided by the “why,” it helps to look at things through context.
What is it about the company website that’s making people click, and how do we capitalize on that? What gets prospective customers scrolling, and what’s stopping them? How do we build a better landing page? That’s where Power BI comes in, allowing users to piece together visualizations of data to tell a cohesive visual story to guide strategic decision making.
Predictive Power
In today’s competitive scene, accurate market predictions can make or break a company’s success against competitors. It’s a race out there to set the best targeted ads and get the most clicks.
Power BI makes use of AI-powered forecasting models that can provide working models from historical data on financial forecasts, market growth, or other statistics to show you probable results in neat visual formats. With this, your enterprise’s predictive analytics skyrocket past your competition.
Age of Data Transformation
As time passes, The volume of business data is an ever-growing field of flowers to pluck from. Many say that today’s digital age is miles more competitive than ever before. Now that businesses are equipped with data analytics software and strategies, the common operation is in analyzing current market trends and values and predicting outcomes from that.
Now, more than ever, is the time to adapt. Are you sure your team is ready to enable a data-driven culture? Click here to learn more about our 2-day MS Power BI training to get ten steps ahead of the competition and become a data-driven business.
