How to become a data driven organization?
The definition of data driven is: create a culture of innovation that positions data at the core of your organization. This is not achieved by only implementing a software tool or executing an IT project. Becoming data driven is a process that will take time an effort to achieve. Starting with gathering data for reporting and growing in the data strategy till data will become part of innovating nature of the organization.
Data central organization?
When your organization has chosen to become a data driven organization, one of the first supporting project to consider is creating a central data store. Simply put the this data store will act a central storage of all the data existing in your organization.
Of course the central data store also has additional functions that are beneficial for the data architecture of data driven organizations. Think of historical correctness and applied central business logic to validate data and get the ’one truth’.
Historically correct data is achieved by checking all data coming from the different source. If it has changed we will write the new data in a separate record and timestamp it. This way we can always determine what data was valid at any point in time.
With the data store 2.0 you can also choose to validate data coming from several sources. If athlete information is available in several sources by applying business logic we can construct an Athlete record with correct information.
Putting the Data Store centrally in your organization it can also be used to sync data between all the different data storages within your organization.
More than reporting!
As seen in becoming a data driven organization, it doesn’t stop with reporting. Reporting is only the first part. Next you can use the information to analyze specific topics to determine improvements and empower your employees so that they can work more efficient, and spend less time preparing on topics. This time that has become available can then we used, together with the information gathered to be more innovating in the topics ad hand.