What Makes a Market Leader in Data Culture?

Data Culture is becoming increasingly more important inside organisations in 2022 due to the core belief that having a strong data culture inside an organisation leads to an environment for growth toward decisions that are Data Driven.  A recent study showed that of 1,100 participating organisations were examined across five metrics; Mindset, Talent, Sharing, Trust, Commitment. Those with the highest scoring across these 5 metrics were considered "Data-Leading".

So, what makes a market leader in data culture?

Mindset: Industry leaders tend to foster environments that allow for curiosity and innovation. This is usually in the form of experimentation and exploration which generates a learning cycle of attempting, failing, readjusting and optimising. Individuals and organisations benefit from such cycles as they help them to bridge gaps and reduce guesswork that would otherwise arise. Expectation of data in decision-making processes is an example of a data-leading mindset. 

The data decision-making gap: 

"99% of Fortune 1000 companies planning to invest in data and AI in the next 5 years"

"30% say current actions are driven by data analysis"

Talent: Data-Leading organisations tend to have executives who understand these gaps and are more likely to implement  strategies to bridge them.For example, daily integration of data into meetings, presentations and discussions. Another data leading strategy example is requiring new hires to be able to present data effectively and persuasively during the recruitment process (3x more likely to implement this).

Sharing: Market leaders emphasise collaboration in all aspects of business including data culture. It encourages conversation between departments while maintaining continuity of culture across the board. This can be achieved by identifying data and information silos and then taking steps to break these as best as possible. This also requires higher levels of trust and access to work effectively.  

Trust: Industry leaders build high trust models by giving full transparency and accessibility to employees when using data. They are more likely to run horizontally by breaking down boundaries between departments, units or locations. As a result, employees feel more accountable for the data they have access to. This process can be streamlined by providing easier access to data for the employees.

Commitment: Data-leading organisations value data as an asset, making them stand out from companies who don't. Commitment is shown by executives of industry leaders who are also 8x more likely to use data on a daily basis than competitors. When data processes are aligned with  business goals that organisation is much more likely to perform well against traditional business metrics (profit, productivity, and customer satisfaction).

How do you build a good Data culture?

Align data and analytics to business outcomes. Prioritise data in decision-making and business processes. Unite over a shared mission to lead with data. 

What benefit will I see as a business?

As depicted in the graph above, businesses that can become industry data leaders are more likely to perform better against standard business metrics. Most noticeably customer satisfaction increases more than double when comparing industry data leaders to not. Productivity and time to market also follow this trend and more specifically to the APAC region the gap in data literacy is expanded by more than 45% when comparing market leaders to others.

Market Data Leaders by industry

Technology

Finance

Manufacturing

Industries with the most room to improve

Healthcare

Education

Retail