An undisputed fact: data is the key to unlocking the potential of your business. It contains the insights to drive growth, generate efficiency and put you ahead of the competition. It is increasingly evident that using data to influence decision making in every aspect of your company will result in greater success. 

However, many businesses, both large and small, are intimidated by data. The huge volumes of data they produce and its sheer complexity are leading issues as to why companies struggle to adopt a data-driven approach; businesses lack the capability to gather and interpret all this data themselves without major investment.

It is exceedingly difficult to manually gather large amounts of data from disparate sources and turn it into meaningful insights. Recent research shows most companies gather data from more than at least 6 separate sources, with 23% of companies using 20 or more sources. Traditional spreadsheets just can’t cope with this complexity (88% spreadsheets contain at least 1 error).

There is also the added expense of hiring teams of data analysts and the frustrations when analysis and reports can’t be produced, as these analysts are working on ‘important projects’.

In a recent BARC study, five key areas were flagged as urgent issues to be addressed within companies wanting to optimise their data-driven decision making:

• Improving data quality
• Lowering the cost of access to information
• Presenting data in easy-to-read formats
• Making information easier to access
• Increasing the speed at which information is readily available 

This is where data analytics platforms and services come in. 

New self-service platforms give you and your employees the ability to gather, analyse and visualise data in minutes. Anyone can access specific sets of data and create reports, summaries of which are presented in simple, but informative, graphs and charts. This makes it easy for anybody within the company to identify trends or patterns, and use this information to inform everyday decisions, as well as the larger impacting ones.

It empowers decision makers, enabling them to make more informed business decisions more efficiently. This directly results in better products or service, real-time evaluation of performance and drives efficiency and process improvement. 

Data analytics gives businesses independence and control over their data.