Azure Data Week - 5 Components of a Real Data-Driven Culture

Just a note that our Azure Every Day posts this week will be stepping away from our normal posts as our regular bloggers are tied up with our Azure Data Week virtual conference all week. Hope you are registered and attending this great week of Azure sessions! Instead, we will be posting some Azure blogs written by some of our consultants and a couple old favorites. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program of new Azure content each weekday starting next Monday, Oct. 15^th!

Here's a post about how to get a real data-driven culture: 

At Pragmatic Works, many customers often ask: How can we use tools like Power BI and the cloud to build a data culture? Building a data culture is much more than technology. There’s so much data out there and many people get confused, asking: Is what I’m getting correct or am I getting the right numbers?

We surveyed our customers that get it right and have the best, mature data driven culture. In this installment of our Azure Every Day series, we’ve put together the 5 important building blocks to get your data culture on target.

1. Single Source of Truth

In any company, you have so many different platforms where you’re getting your data from, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. You need to find a way to pull your data together (sales data, marketing data) into one place, so everyone is using the same data.

2. Data Dictionary

I like to look at this more as a data roadmap. The dictionary defines the data, but there’s a lot more you need to know, like who owns it, who creates it and is it compliance regulated. It’s also important to know how the calculation is done. If someone can’t look up how the calculation is done, they may make an assumption that may change that number. Our DOC xPress software easily helps you create a data dictionary.

3. Data Access for All

Bring data from multiple departments together. Use the data to discuss the goals and outcomes across departments, sales and marketing for example, so these goals can be tied together, instead of each department looking at separate reports for only their team.

4. Data Literacy

Many businesses invest in expensive data products or in moving to the cloud. But it’s extremely important that once you have that data access, that you have the data literacy to know what to do with it across all departments. Your team needs to know what to look at and what data is valuable to them in their role.

You may need to invest in training for tools like Power BI, so everyone can consume the data they need. Pragmatic Works has a wide variety of training opportunities, from free training to our On-Demand Training platform with courses and workshops available on all the right tools.

5. Decision Making

With a real data driven culture, you want the data to drive and support different options. Use the data to have constructive discussions across all departments, not just the high stakes people, and bring the data together and use it to drive decisions.

If you’re interested in getting your data culture started off right this year, our amazing team has the expertise and experience, as well as the software, consulting and training options that can help you get on the right path to creating a real data driven culture. Visit our website or contact us to set up a discussion today.