Information Week recently published “9 Way to Tap Into Smart Data-Driven Decisions.” The article is mainly about reducing organizational impediments to making data-driven decisions, and briefly covers these primary points:
- Address the Data Silos
- Provide Incentives to Share Data
- Adopt a Data-Drive Mindset
- Communicate Insights Concisely
- Optimize Your Architecture
- Integrate Data Into Workflows
- Collaborate
- Beware of [Poor] Data Quality
- Prepare for the IoT (“Internet of Things”)
All of these topics are relevant to our nonprofit clients, who often come to us with the pain of not being able to leverage the systems and data to produce meaningful insights. (Though point #9 may be relevant only small portion of organizations.)
The Information Week article is a striking reminder that the availability of technology is a relatively small concern in the overall picture of making data-driven decisions. (Only two of the above points are explicitly about the technology.) Organization change is the key!
