Data: How much is enough before you start using it?

If you are a senior leader in an organization or have been a business manager or even the Finance guy, you have often discussed the lack of data in decision making. Organizations still coming up the curve on systematically capturing data feel a bit crippled when making important decisions and resort to higher instances of ‘hit-and-trial’.

"Our experience at Praxis shows that irrespective of when you installed an MIS, every organization has enough data to get started on the journey of data-driven-decision making."

• Are you often discussing individual opinions on the way forward when making important decisions like pricing?
• Does it long for you to prepare for critical meetings? (vs data for decision making being readily available)
• In the last 12 months, have you felt the need to systematically map what your key decisions are, and what data you need for those?

If the answer to the above is a ‘Yes’,  you are probably grappling with collecting, assimilating and processing the right data at the right time for the right stakeholder.

In our client work, we have found and used data in some creative ways:

• Data that is not explicitly captured e.g. data generated from machines uptime and maintenance, attendance records.
• Combining manual observation with public data e.g. we monitored the cab availability, wait times with Google traffic data at specific junctions in a city.
• Open information on the web, be it product listings on a classifieds portal or sentiment analysis on product reviews can often give deep insights on its own strategy vs the competitor’s.
• Government and quasi-governmental organizations make a lot of data publicly available e.g., crime data, census data, telecom BTS geo-spatial mapping, industry association databases and even sentiment analyses of key political speeches overtimes.
• Basic technology logs like email records (just the sender and recipient ids; without the email contents) was plotted on a social graph to see how different teams and people in the organization are collaborating.

Praxis’ D3 (D-cube) framework helps organizations identify opportunities systematically and realize the benefits of Data-Driven Decision making faster. 

Authored by (at the time of writing):

Madhur Singhal, Leader, HiTech IT and Tech Practice

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