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What if you don’t want to be a data-driven enterprise?

Mike Price
2020-05-20

Companies have to change the way they look at data. They understand data has value, so now they need to leverage it. But they are often unsure how to do that, and therefore do not get the return on investment that comes with being a data-driven enterprise.

Getting there is difficult, as is engaging with the business to drive transformation. The first issue is data is unusable without trust. That means the winners in the market are the ones that gain trust in their data to drive and adopt new business models, powering transformation inside and outside of the four walls of the company.

Adopting a data-driven culture does not happen overnight. Employees have been in their roles for a long time and are used to working in a particular way. Companies need people to understand that value lies in data that helps them do their jobs, and will not necessarily make their jobs obsolete. Instead, their impact on the business will be enhanced. For example, automation based on artificial intelligence and machine learning can use data-science algorithms to predict sales volume forecasts, so the supply chain can be optimized quicker than any human could do it.

Monetizing data is a cultural hurdle. It will take time for employees to accept change and trust the data and the process. Everybody can benefit, whether it is someone on the shop floor fine tuning production and the quality of the product coming off the line all the way to a C-level executive making a financial decision.

Everybody needs data. It is about understanding the types of data each nodes requires. Once you have truly adopted a data-driven culture, each node in the company becomes more savvy and asks more questions. And in many cases, they ask for data that expands the scope of their understanding and they then bring different ideas and insights.

The best run companies are organizing around a data-driven culture. Step one is capturing large volumes of data and making sense of the chaos. Getting the data to the right parts of the organization to make business decisions is step two. Data is worthless if it is not in the right hands. https://www.youtube.com/embed/DQvEFopYNHU?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.capgemini.com

Mike Price is a Vice President with the Insights & Data team and is responsible for SAP initiatives. He has been guiding clients at Capgemini for more than 16 years and can be reached at michael.r.price@capgemini.com.