How to Cultivate a Data Driven Culture

From the KPI Tree to visibility, accessibility and making your data a habit, take these 4 steps to creating your data driven culture.

1. Define What is Important

Your data cannot take you where you want to go unless you know your desired destination. So begin by defining the driving factors for your data-led decisions. Is acquisition the focus, or is it just as important to address attrition and execute better cross and up-sell strategies? What about customer engagement and delivering exceptional customer experiences?

With business goals determined, you then need to ensure your KPIs are aligned to them. One way of doing that is by using a KPI Tree. Start by identifying the top level goal, then identify the underlying factors that influence it.　

2. Make Your Data Accessible and Visible

For a data-driven culture to become ingrained, your data needs to readily accessible. For that, it must be a) integrated and b) employ good visualisation approaches that make it readily understandable and useful. Doing that demands technology, of course, but it also requires the right people and processes, all aligned with your data integration and visibility agenda.

3. Develop Your Data Strategy

Implement an organisation-wide data strategy to ensure quality, consistency, governance and availability are considered, managed and executed. Start with the areas of the business directly related to the objectives you are trying to achieve. Start small, get buy-in, then build out from there. 　

4. Make Data-Driven a Habit

Apparently it takes 61 days to form a habit (not the 21 days often cited), so to ensure your data-driven behaviours become a natural part of the culture, it’s important to recognise the stages of habit formation, as identified by Tom Bartow. You will need to pass the initial "honeymoon" period when things feel easy, and the "fight thru" stage when old habits resurface and require you to refocus on the end goal.

By the time you reach the point at which data-driven feels "second nature", you should find what the data says is as important to you as your own intuition. When you can weave data, intuition and experience together you will deliver better decision making that benefits your marketing activity.