Why Adopt a Data-Driven Culture

June 28, 2022

In this article, we will discuss the reasons why you should consider adopting a data-driven culture for your organization. 

As we have mentioned in previous articles on this forum, a data-driven culture will bring you an increase in revenue. This, above all, should be the number one reason that you should adopt a data-driven culture. What are some of the other benefits besides revenue increases?

We will discuss six main reasons including:

  • Managing the effectiveness of the business changes you put in place
  • Becoming more effective
  • Catering to customer needs to drive profitability 
  • Better operational excellence to look for savings
  • Determining strategic moves
  • Monitoring employee culture

All of these reasons are how you get to the additional revenue increases. Let's discuss them in a little more detail.

Managing your business changes

Often when we put business changes in place we don’t monitor or define KPIs that we will review to determine if that business decision is getting the results that you desired. When you have a data-driven culture of looking at data to make business decisions, you will make them more effective and you will also put data measurements in place for decisions to ensure that those decisions are following through on the expectations that you had. 

This does two things for the business:

  • Allows you to course-correct on decisions that aren’t effective
  • Learn from your mistakes to improve decisions over time

Both of these contribute to ongoing better decision-making and profit improvement. 

Becoming more effective

As mentioned in the above point, becoming more effective over time is a benefit of learning from your decision-making. When you have the ability to review and reflect in a data-driven way, it becomes a team effort around making and correcting decisions so everyone stays on the same page. Over time the team becomes more and more effective as a whole, increasing overall productivity, time to decision, and profit from decisions. 

Catering to customer needs

When you have better data at your fingertips you will be able to see more clearly the open opportunities with your customer base. Usually, there are opportunities in additional products, slight pricing changes, etc. that can increase your relationship with customers. 

Measurements like NPS (Net Promoter Score) are just the beginning of the data points that help you analyze more effectively how you are performing with your customer base and where your opportunities are for improvement. 

In all customer bases, there are customers who really enjoy your products and services and those that don’t or are on the fence. Knowing who these customers are helps you focus on those customers that really enjoy your products and services and cater more to their business needs. This improves profitability and your NPS numbers over time. 

Better operational excellence

Having a data-driven culture overall helps you drive better operational excellence. You will be able to take a look at your supply chain and vendor management (just to name a few) to look for savings opportunities across the board. By regularly monitoring data and having reports for exceptions in the business you will be able to see patterns where costs may be going up and mitigate the risk in the business by finding alternative methods and savings. 

Determining strategic moves

If you are leading with data you will have the ability at the highest level in the organization to be looking at industry trends on a regular basis. These industry trends paired with data from your own organization combined can lead you to decisions around strategic shifts you should make in your organization to be more effective. For instance, leading indicators can be defined by pairing both inside and outside data to predict future revenue or recessions. Companies like ITR economics help organizations with this type of data mapping pairing both external and internal data to make business decisions. 

Monitoring employee culture

Your ENPS (employee net promoter score) and other leading indicators like churn and average time to hire can help you determine the current satisfaction of your employee base. ENPS is a predictive measurement of your customer's NPS score as researched by Bain and Company and Fred Reichheld. When you are focused on data-driven decisions, making shifts in team member decisions can be helpful when you have data at your fingertips helping you see what your employees' point of view is. 

All of these suggestions are slight shifts that happen in your business once you have adopted a data-driven culture. For tips on how to adopt a more data-driven culture please see our recorded webinar that will go into further detail on how to roll this out for your organization.

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