Fact Based Decision Making

For many companies the first reporting and analytics question that they ask is, “What specific items should my company measure?” However, what you measure should be based on how to get results from your data that make measurable change in the organization. The first question really is, “What are my business goals and what measurable components can help me achieve or miss this goal?

Decision Man

Some examples are:

  1. Churn reduction
  2. Retirement possibilities in the next year.
  3. Employees that leave in less than a year
  4. Departments with the highest attrition
  5. Supply chain service improvement
  6. JIT miscalculations by department or location
  7. Customer service complaints, late deliveries to customers
  8. Staffing variations and what affect this has on production 

Why fact based is important…

Another huge common occurrence in the reporting world is decisions made without trackable, measureable fact. Unbelievably, companies still make decisions with historical process, experience, and their “gut” to some degree.

With the availability of big data, your competitors are not only going to have access to information about themselves, but also about your customers and your ability to perform. If this data is not used well by your company – you will lose business.

So how exactly does your company aggregate data, produce reports, or glean insight to meet goals? If you are like the vast majority of companies out there, it is a big data dump into a spreadsheet that is picked through and interpreted by the individual who requested it.

Many have very slick Reporting solutions, but they are not leveraging them to the full potential – not by a long shot. Why is this? The pervasive gaps are that people are creatures of habit and continue to want to report like they have always done and change management/training is not factored in. The poor IT Manager put in charge of the BI project is inundated with data dump requests and help requests on-going.

Circling back to Data Driven Decisions, the very first things that must be carefully and completely determined are:

  1. What are the challenges that prevent me/my company from beating the competition, increasing revenue, operating smoothly, etc?
  2. What people drive the resolution of these challenges?
  3. What data and report metrics do these users need to show the golden road to overcoming the challenges?

Beginning with what decisions need to be made, which people will drive goal attainment, then what data and metrics will roll up to an answer – the first big hurdle to Business Intelligence success will have been overcome.

For more on this subject, watch this space… blogs.amickbrown.com/