3. Reporting – As organizations improve their use of data, they begin to
report on these integrated data sets. This Reporting phase is focused on
providing visibility to common metrics and measurements so that staff
have readily available information when making decisions.
4. Alerting – As organizations mature beyond solely accessing integrated
data for decision making, they develop capabilities to alert key decision
makers when common metrics look like they are on a negative trajectory.
This enables rapid response by experienced staffers to make the neces-
sary adjustments and corrections.
5. Engaging – The most mature organizations move beyond alerting and
use data in all aspects of their business to measure, respond and
improve. Organizations at this level of maturity have a culture that values
data driven decisions and deep analysis of correlated effects and
causation for events.
Being a data driven organization means the simplification of all processes for
decision making. This ensures that decisions can be automated, made quickly,
and effectively measured and recovered from if failures do occur. All processes
should be broken down into discrete elements and automated where possible.
There will inevitably be areas of the organization that will require manual input
in various phases. But the key is to minimize those, and eliminate them as bet-
ter data becomes available for decision making.
One way to prioritize this transformation of decision-making processes is to
measure the cost of a decision. Decisions that have a low cost of failure, or high
rate of return should be automated first. Decisions that have a higher cost of
failure, often including the impact on human life, should be the last to auto-
mate until the appropriate safeguards and checks are in place to eliminate the
risk of negative consequences.
This process of re-engineering will be dependent on the staff who understand the
processes today and thus will be tasked with the automation of those processes.
Cultural habits will have to be developed to encourage staff to think in new ways,
let go of job functions that were once manual, and encourage collaboration around
integrated data sets to better facilitate decision making across departments.
This cultural change will require new skills, both technical and soft skills, to
enable staff to be effective. Training should augment any outside hiring in the
organization. This training should focus on enabling staff with new skills, both
to make the transition to a data driven organization, but also to encourage staff
to constantly improve their use of data.
Creating a data driven organization involves making a simultaneous commit-
ment to maturing people, processes and technology. The technology enables the
process that is defined and executed by the people. A data driven organization
integrates data sets, provides access, and encourages automation of discrete
process elements. These organizations focus on the measurement of all deci-
sions so that constant improvements can be made and staff enabled to focus pri-
marily on exceptions, in order to provide maximum value to the business.
SUMMER 2017 | THE DOPPLER | 11