As more and more businesses go through digitalization, more data such as sales and inventories could be recorded accurately. If businesses have the ability to understand their data, this would enable them to make more informed decisions for their business. However, based on Harvard Business Review, only 26.5% of businesses can be considered adopting a data driven culture. Even though many businesses understand the importance of data, the number of businesses who fully utilize their business data is still low. Hence, the next important question would be if the businesses want to be data-driven, what is stopping them from doing so? So let’s take a look and find out what is stopping your business from adopting a data-driven culture?
Key Challenges That Stop Businesses From Adapting Data Driven Culture
Huge amount of data that is overwhelming to be understood
Weak data literacy
Insufficient adequate analytics tools
1. Huge amount of data that is overwhelming to be understood
Towards the end of the month, you extract all your sales data from your POS system. As you believe that you could find meaningful patterns behind the sales records, you go from one month's excel file to another to look for the particular sets of data, that is the time when you realize hours have passed just for you to obtain a single piece of information. As your business expands and SKU increases, the amount of data of your inventories and sales obtained in your POS system also gradually increases, making your monthly tedious task more and more time consuming as you need more time to reorganize and analyze all the extracted data. Thus, when you are occupied with your daily retail operations, chances are you might focus on other more urgent and important tasks from your suppliers and clients, instead of spending time to understand the huge amount of data that is overwhelming to be understood. When this happens, most probably that your business decision could only be based on past experiences that might not be relevant to the current situations.
2. Weak data literacy
For your team members who have just started to work with your business data, chances are they will not be able to completely comprehend the data and let alone to utilize them in improving daily retail operations. To find meaningful connection between the data that is scattered among different excel sheets, it will require the staff to have great data organizational and data analytical skills. Without extensive technical support and professional training, your team members might find the data analytics job intimidating when they lose direction wandering in the sea of data. In addition, based on Forbes, a research showed that 74% of staff reported their stressful experiences when they are working with data that they could not comprehend. This emotional struggle would further hinder your team members from coming out with data-driven decisions via the usage of your business data.
3. Insufficient adequate analytics tools
In a retailer's POS system, you basically have all the data you need. However, the challenge here is to view and understand them holistically. You might be able to understand the data when they are in their original respective file extracted from your system. However, to get an overview of your data, you have to go through every single piece of your data manually, understanding them one by one and integrating them to derive meaningful information. In addition, while you go across different parts of your business data, you might find it difficult to see the connection between the data you have. And, chances are you might not be able to interpret your data holistically as you miss out important connections between these data.
All in all, these are the 3 key challenges that stop businesses from adapting data-driven culture. As you can see, to make your business more data-driven, not only that your staff have to be well-versed in data analytics, your business also has to be equipped with adequate data analytics tools such as business intelligence software. Interested to know how BI software could help your team to unleash the full potential of your business data? Wondering where you could find BI-related services at affordable cost? Fret not! Inquire now or check out our solutions to take an in-depth look at how you can adopt BI for your business today!