Many organizations have data that goes unused. Whether it’s siloed, inaccessible, or lost in a data swamp, unused data is likely costing your organization time, money, and more valuable resources. 

The necessity of utilizing data has only been fast-tracked over the last few years with the COVID-19 pandemic, but now the use of data is critical for organizations to survive in the current marketplace. 

As Jeremy Blaney, the director of customer solutions at Tableau, stated, “Data-driven decisions went from being a priority goal to absolutely necessary in order to survive the unplanned and significant changes to the business environment.” 

Data plays a critical role in business planning, which is why organizations need to understand how it supports operations and growth. All of that stored information is one of their important assets and competitive advantages — both now and in the future. 

What is Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM)? 

Data-driven decision making, sometimes also known as data-based decision making, is the process of utilizing data to make informed decisions that can benefit your business. This informed decision making comes to fruition when organizations make this harvested data widely available and actionable for employees to use in their day-to-day work.

At Onix, we have a four-step journey that empowers organizations to make automated, data-driven decisions. We walk you through each of these steps to help you evaluate and utilize your data for long-term success. 

• Descriptive. In this phase, we help you prepare to review what has happened in the past. What can you learn from the data your organization already has? 
• Diagnostic. In the second phase, it’s time to look at the reasoning behind the data. Why did these things happen? What data points can you connect? This step allows you to easily perform diagnostics, find correlations within your data, and more. 
• Predictive. At this point, we encourage your organization to look to the future. Based on the data we have and the connections that have already been made, what can you presume will happen? 

Finally, we get to step 4, which is where many organizations strive to be. However, it’s crucial that the previous steps are completed so your organization can know to properly automate based on your data. Without that knowledge, your organization is likely making ineffective decisions that are costing time and money. 

• Prescriptive. In this final stage, it’s time to create recommendations based on what you’ve learned from your data. Then, it’s time to find possible automations to make your solutions occur with minimal decision making necessary. 

Through these steps, we make data-driven decision making not only possible but automated. This allows your organization to make decisions without second-guessing with up-to-date, accurate data to back them up. 

What are the benefits of Data-Driven Decision Making? 

By utilizing your organization’s data, you can make smarter decisions that help your organization have a data-driven culture and competitive advantage above others in your industry. 

These decisions can allow your organization to continuously improve, including by: 

• Making more informed decisions. This helps your organization stay ahead of its competitors and plan for the short- and long-term. 
• Saving time. By automating your decisions, you can save time by not having as much data to organize, plan, and connect, since that’s already done for you. 
• Cost-effective planning. By making decisions that can save your organization money, you can increase your budget for other aspects of your business. 
• Improving innovation. With optimized data, your organization has the ability to quickly connect team members with one another, uncover solutions that were hiding in unorganized data, and create new revenue streams. 

While there are more, these are three of the most common benefits that organizations find across industries. Data-driven decision making can improve your organization today and in the future. 

Make the most out of your data 

We live in a digital, data-driven world and the amount of information created, captured, and consumed globally only continues to skyrocket. 

Leveraging a migration and modernization plan, you can: 

• Build a strong foundation for your data so you can get impactful insights today while enabling tomorrow’s capabilities.
• Improve your data’s security, compliance, and governance.
• Create a self-serve, data-driven culture within your organization.

While the pandemic’s pressure on companies has increased the need to start using their data in more actionable ways, it’s beneficial for long-term results as well. 

Ready to learn more about creating an effective data utilization strategy? Download our eBook, Modern Data Strategy: How Leading Organizations Are Leveraging Data As An Asset, to discover how Onix can help you maximize your own data.