How do companies benefit from data analytics?
The fourth industrial revolution generates a need for adaptation in business to new emerging opportunities to deliver value to the customer, ensuring continued growth over time.
Data analysis is a big opportunity and a challenge at the same time. A good analysis of information lets to share clear ideas, conclude, and decision-making. Therefore, a trained team and a basic understanding of how to turn data into clear, simple, and convincing conclusions is the new hallmark of companies navigating this new revolution.
According to the global study Analytics as a source of business innovation arried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, more than half of the companies in the world (55%) use data as a tool for knowledge and influence to obtain competitive advantages in the market and to plan their business strategies.
Understanding how to work with data is not a job for a specific area in a company, but it must be a joint effort from all areas, ensuring that the information shared between collaborators is clear and facilitates efficient decision making.
In this article, we share a 4-step guide to facilitate data analysis, focusing on how it lets us the process of decision-making, conclude and modify the work dynamics through numbers, and brings the highest efficiency.
The four steps:
1. Training: Here is important to understand the information you are working with, getting what it is composed of, what areas of the company are involved in, and making sure that it is clean information, non duplicated or with errors that may alter the results (Berinato, 2016).
Subsequently, we should think of questions about the exercise, such as:
• What will the title of the graph be?
• Who is it for?
• In what situation will it be used?
• What kind of visualization am I creating? If it is to expose an idea, to compare values, expose trends, etc.
This first step does not carry too much detail. Its goal is to prepare a basic understanding to go into detail in the following steps.
This first exercise should take approximately 5 to 10 minutes.
2. Speak and listen: Fostering conversations with the collaborators, through questions to provide us the answers about the needs of the people to whom the information will be presented and ensure that our report and graphics respond to those needs (Berinato, 2016).
The following three questions help to make this interaction short and effective:
• Why are we working with this information?
• What are you trying to explain, prove, understand, etc?
• Why? “
“The first two questions give us context, while the third one allows us to get specific answers. Then, we must repeat 3 or 4 times the question “”Why?”” until we can identify the root of the situation, what we want to capture with our analysis, so let leaders make good decisions and mitigate any difficulty.
Example:
-Collaborator: To my boss, I am going to present that, in terms of customer retention, we are doing better than he thinks.
-Analyst: Why does your boss think you are not doing well?
-Collaborator: Well, our retention has lowered the last two quarters, I know it does not look good, but it is not as important as he thinks.
-Analyst: Why do you consider that it is not so important?
-Collaborator: Well, our retention clearly decreased, but our competitors too, even more than us, so I believe it is related to the market.
-Analyst: Ok, I got it. So if I can, through my analysis, show your boss that the problem is with the market and not with our company, we can tell him that we should direct our efforts not to change things in the company, but to analyze what is happening in the market.
3. Sketch: with the information we recollected, and the goal to fulfill the analysis, we sketch how the graphs expose our ideas. To facilitate the selection of the graphics, we recommend the following guide (Figure 1). The idea is, based on what we want to show, we select in which category it classifies and then choose the best graphs to expose the information (Berinato, 2016).
