German
Could good old-fashioned personal accountability be the key to executing better on data? Let’s find out more.
We shouldn’t need to tell CIOs about data-driven decision-making and its benefits, but it’s surprising how many organizations aren’t taking advantage. While research from Accenture found that data-driven enterprises generate more than 30% growth annually, 30% of high-value enterprises don’t consider themselves to be data-driven. Why is this? Most businesses find they face one of the following three challenges:
1. Not enough useable data in the business
2. Too much data to deal with
3. People don’t execute on data-driven insights
Many large companies face the second challenge: too much data. In a Braze survey, 80% of respondents said they collect too much data and do not use it effectively. The sheer volume of data within a company is overwhelming and makes finding the insights that actually deliver value, such as identifying cost savings or operational efficiencies extremely difficult.
However, it’s the third challenge that more companies are experiencing right now. They don’t have the internal structure, skill sets or accountability in their business to turn insight into action. Let’s dive deeper into these challenges and explore the solution.
Solving the data issue
In order to identify the data sitting in your business that can help you improve operational efficiency or identify cost savings, your data has to first be of a high enough quality. This means your data must be as complete and accurate as possible, comprehensively labelled so it has context and purpose, and be free from noise such as bot activity.
Once you have the right data in your business, you need the right tech to enable your people to manage, analyze and report on it, or alternatively, the right tech to do this all for you. This number crunching allows you to discover opportunities for improvement and turn those essential insights into action. You’ll find a wide range of tools available that say they can help you turn data into tangible business results - but unless you know how to interpret this data, it can be pretty generic information. Data collection tools are especially prevalent too. But don’t stop at collection. Ensure your solution covers data analysis, insights and next steps, as that’s what turns data into information your people can make sense of and use.
While your tech solution can build the dashboards, crunch the numbers, carry out the analysis and produce reports, you still need people with the right skill sets to understand what they’re reading, what it means and what to do next. In IT financial management, these skill sets are hard to come by. In fact, it typically takes a combination of three roles to understand the insights, identify opportunities and put them into action:
● Finance - To understand the numbers
● IT - To understand the tech and infrastructure
● Operations/Business - To understand how it impacts the wider business and achieving business goals.
But even when you have all this, there’s still something missing.
The value of personal accountability
The secret ingredient for turning insight into action is accountability. When you can link responsibility and actions to data and insights, you have something that can truly transform a business and unlock operational efficiencies, cost savings and more.
Here’s why it works:
1. Efficiency – When you assign responsibility for executing on data insights, each person (and the rest of the organization) gets a clearer understanding of their role. The project manager can then create a timeline for each person to perform their tasks. Without responsibility, everything is vague
2. Productivity – As long as everyone has the skills to perform their tasks, executing on insights should be a breeze. You can get everyone working as a team, completing tasks faster than any ad hoc system
3. Ownership – Giving someone responsibility bolsters their confidence and gets them more invested in the task. It’s likely they’ll want to take this opportunity to shine, putting in more effort and leading to better performance.
Turn cost savings visibility from data into action by making your people personally accountable for executing insights. It makes your business instantly more data-driven and progressive – and you can reap the benefits, such as avoiding overspend and minimizing waste.
Download the free guide: How to turn IT Finance insight into action for real business value
Turning insights into action
Serviceware Financial gives senior management and team leaders complete transparency on their cost spending and potential savings. However, you can take it to the next level, ensuring your people take action as a result of your reports and insights - and delivering valuable peace of mind.
By enabling the organization with the right tools, you ensure that your business continues to operate at maximum efficiency and that senior leadership spends less time chasing progress updates or figuring out action plans to realize quantifiable value.
How does it work?
Get in touch today to find out more about the IT Financial Management solution from Serviceware: serviceware-se.com/demo
