Understanding business processes better, in-depth, and quickly means knowing their intrinsic mechanisms and acquiring the ability to modify them to increase business results. Both by orienting roles and skills through careful planning of activities and developing the ability to intervene on the run, with fine-tuning and correction of the strategies adopted.
Everything lies in making informed decisions based on the collection and analysis of the data generated by the processes themselves and the creation of predictive and prescriptive models for organizational management. This, in a nutshell, is what a Data-Driven Company does.
Data-Driven Strategy: A Necessary Change Of Mindset
From new business opportunities to operational and strategic choices, passing through the management of ordinary administration, a Data-Driven Strategy is feasible only if the company is willing to face a radical cultural change, focusing on collaboration and data democracy. What does it mean?
It means overcoming the old-fashioned management approach, according to which the right decisions are, regardless, those of those who occupy the highest position in the hierarchy or enjoy certain seniority; it means making the knowledge deriving from data analysis available to the entire organization, avoiding their structuring in silos. Therefore, the company must promote creative and exploratory thinking, feed innovative ideas at all levels, adopt an inclusive approach, which must involve each element of the value chain.
A Data-Driven Strategy To Rewrite Business Processes
Contrary to what one might imagine, it is unnecessary to have substantial information volumes to create a Data-Driven Strategy. It is evident that the more numerous and varied the inputs, the more accurate the insights will be. Still, any organization, regardless of its size, in carrying out its activities generates a quantity of data sufficient to feed the analytical platforms. These, interpolating them with other contextual elements, can fully describe the internal processes.
Each of the company databases is fundamental to allow the analysis tools to establish with extreme precision relations of force and cause-and-effect between decisions, events, and interventions that affect the outputs along entire supply chains. This is how it is possible to identify critical issues, bottlenecks, margins for improvement in each transformation phase.
By associating data extracted from other systems to this flow, such as CRM (Customer Relation Management) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and by applying Machine learning algorithms, the analytical platforms become able to recognize the patterns that distinguish the operations of the company, thus making it possible to identify with ever greater accuracy the rules and exceptions that occur in these relationships. Over time, this allows you to develop the ability to predict business performance according to the new variables introduced into the system and re-engineer the procedures from time to time to express the maximum potential in terms of efficiency.
Correctness, Integrity, And Security: The Importance Of Data Governance Tools
Therefore, it is clear that data analysis can have a significant, concrete impact on business processes. For this impact to be genuinely positive, it is necessary to verify that the founding elements of a Data-Driven Strategy are guaranteed in terms of the correctness, integrity, and security of the information. Otherwise, the creation of possible distorting effects on the expected business results.
High data quality standards can only be achieved by adopting adequate data governance tools: software solutions able to help not only advanced users such as data scientists but also all corporate stakeholders who, despite not having specific skills, can contribute to the generation of valuable insights by collecting, organizing, reading and distributing data relating to processes and activities.
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