Are you thinking about deploying the latest machine learning or even AI applications because you want to use your data for competitive advantage? 

Often in the pursuit of the latest data initiative, organisations believe they can skip the fundamentals and start with the more advanced applications of data. So, before embarking on that journey and hiring a suite of data scientists, ask yourself if you’ve done the basics.

Firstly, before you embark on your AI initiative, check if your business intelligence reporting is functioning. If you can’t make your numbers add up consistently, you’ll find that no matter how great the AI you deploy will be, not being able to make business decisions on accurate and consistent data will hinder your business more than any gains you can hope to achieve from your AI initiative. 

Being data-driven, or data-informed as I prefer, is not about hiring PhD data scientists or having a data or ML ops team or even buying the latest no-code data orchestration tools. It’s about making sure the numbers you use to make decisions are robust.

To ensure that your numbers add up and that you are basing your business decisions on facts, you need to take data quality and governance seriously. Companies that have invested in business intelligence tools have gone on the laborious journey of getting their data in order, working on companywide governance and fixing data quality issues, as well as aligning definitions of what metrics or KPIs mean. In essence, they’ve formally or informally established a data strategy. 

They have also unified their data so that access and reporting are streamlined and answering business questions is relatively effortless. Starting your journey to being data-driven is about getting the basics in order. If you have this, then move on to the more advanced stuff. Also, don’t focus on the BI, reporting or visualisation tool. If your data is in order, then the choice of tool is not so important. 

In the long run, it will pay dividends. A company that has accurate data and can get access to that data quickly has a strong sense of how its business is performing, what its customers are doing, what products are selling and where they need to improve. 

At Be Data, we have decades of collective experience in designing, building and executing business intelligence solutions. Get in touch with us at hello@bedatasolutions.com to discuss how we can help you establish the foundations of your data strategy so that you can work towards doing the fun stuff.