DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What advice do you have for retailers and brands looking to become data-driven organizations? Is the primary impediment company culture or is it more about data-quality, lack of training, technology or some other process issue?
Interactive Edge’s CEO, Zel Bianco comments, featured on RetailWire’s Braintrust:
The hurdle is both cultural and technical. Many organizations think that BI tools can be used by all and for all use cases. The reality is that many struggle to use the typical BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. They are powerful tools in the hands of those that have been fully trained. They are not, however, for most employees and certainly not for all use cases. The culture changes more effectively when you provide the majority of the organization tools that are easy to use – that work with the skill sets most business users have and in a format that they feel comfortable using, to create data-driven content that can be used to make decisions without having to wait for the BI team to get to it. Our industry moves too fast to have to wait for another team to go through the data-to-insights process.
You can indeed change the culture of the organization to be more data driven but you have to provide solutions that will be adopted by the majority of users in the organization instead of just a few. In other words, you need both the sophisticated BI tools and the ones that users are already comfortable with. Most business users have decent skill sets in PowerPoint and Excel, especially in CPG and retail. Provide an easy way to access the right data for each use case, and business user-friendly tools to prep the data for presentations and reports and you’ll have an organization that is much more data savvy and more comfortable generating insights from the data. That will be the game changer, and it’s been proven time and again.
Read the entire article at Retail Wire:
What are the hurdles to becoming data-driven?