How are businesses using data today?

Working with data has many benefits for companies. To begin with, data provides insights which make it easy for companies to make better decisions across the spectrum of business – from large giants to any business with a website, social media pages, and which accepts electronic payments. These all have abundant data on customers, user habits, web traffic, demographics - to name a few objects. Data can help managers make better decisions on customer acquisitions, improving their marketing campaigns, keeping abreast of social media interaction, predicting sales trends, keeping existing customers and enhancing customer experiences and tracking business performance. Business performance tracking can be further broken down to enabling managers to know the performance of a team, department, marketing campaigns, customer experiences, shipping and other operational aspects.
Most importantly, data assists in solving problems. Companies are better understanding their decline in sales, or poor performing marketing campaigns. Tracking and analysing data from business processes will help detect performance breakdowns so they can better understand every part of the process and learn steps that need to be taken to fix issues.
However, Val Munsami, Chief Executive Officer of South African National Space Agency, notes that there is a need for data governance within the wealth of data; as businesses do not always know how to manage it. Businesses should be clear on what question they are trying to answer before they start sorting through the data. They need to know why they need additional data in the first place to answer that question. They must also know the starting point of the question, what they will do with the answer and who needs the answer. Val Munsami says, “you don’t know what you don’t know” and he is right. Working with data will prove some of your assumptions wrong and you will see just how much you do not know. At times you will realise that you need a distinct sub-dataset or a specific statistical software that will accelerate your efforts. You also do not know how good your data is until you have started playing with it.
It is important for businesses to ensure that they do not become distracted in the process of sorting through data by focusing on answers to questions they did not ask. Businesses must encourage their teams to create a few datasets so that they only have a few data sources from which to source answers. Data is expensive and spending too much time on it can be costly to the business if unguided by objectives. Having said that, the biggest problem most companies face when it comes to data is data illiteracy.
Takalani Madzhadzhi, Chief Executive Officer of Ashanti AI, observes that there were times when nobody in the business knew how to use the data available. Therefore, it is necessary for companies to establish data literacy programmes. However, he warns that businesses must not feel the need to turn everyone in their company into a data scientist because it is a hard skill that takes years to perfect. Olierhoek shares how Nestlé has established an e-academy that teaches their employees data literacy, but personalises it to how they will use it in their respective working environments. They are also recruiting data scientists internally, selecting individuals who are passionate about data and then making them data stewards who are mentored by data scientists.
COOi Studios encourages the use of data, however we believe this use must be supported with a clear strategy. Articulating the questions or problems that need to be solved is a step in the right direction, before building mechanisms to extract that data. Companies will also need to teach their employees about data, which, with a fairly large learning curve, will take time.

“If we have data, let's look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.” Jim Barksdale, the former Chief Executive Officer of Netscape.

Sources:
Oxford Business Group. (2020). Global CEO Survey 2020. Retrieved from https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/global-ceo-survey-2020