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A data strategy requires clear aims and methodology. You’ve got to work towards a goal in a systematic way. Aimlessly collecting data just for the sake of it is a waste of time, effort, and resources.

Yet, even when you have a plan, you need to situate it in the right environment. You need a ‘data culture’ to ensure your data strategy can be implemented. Think of it like this. To flourish and grow, your houseplants need to be in the right pots with the right soil and nutrients, be placed in enough direct sunlight, and be in a room with the correct level of humidity. Get the environment right, they grow.

When you have a data strategy embedded in the right data culture, your organisation will benefit from improvements in revenue, efficiency, and creative problem solving.

For example, according to research by McKinsey & Company, companies that have created a data-driven culture to support B2B sales have seen significant increases of between 15-25% of their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA). And, organisations who drive their business from the insights extracted from their data are almost three times more likely to report double digit growth year-on-year.

To help your organisation achieve results like this, here are four things business intelligence (BI) can do to create your data culture:

Make your data accessible

To develop a data culture where your employees can extract and maximise the value of your data, you need to make data accessible to almost everyone. The more people who can use your data, the better.

Data lakes and warehouses, of the type we design here at change++, will give you a centralised location for all your data. This allows you to easily share the data, as it’s not siloed inside a department or team, and you can even give people role-based access.

As a single source of truth, where all your data is formatted and structured, you can ensure that everyone is using the same data. This helps to eliminate mistakes and misinterpretation of data.

Make your data understandable

As well as making your data accessible, you should aim to make it understandable. Everyone in your organisation won’t share the same level of data literacy – think of your sales managers compared to your IT team – so ensuring there are different ways for people to digest your data will help.

Having automated reporting and dashboards will guarantee there are ways for all members of your team to take in data. Dashboards present selected data in a visual way, with customisable charts, graphs, and trackers for the most important KPIs. Updated in real time, and with the ability for users to drill down into the details, dashboards help to bring data to everyone in your team.

Use your data to make decisions

When push comes to shove, the reason for using data and analytics is to help you make better, more informed business decisions. A data culture requires you to make decisions based on the data you’ve collected and analysed – business intelligence – rather than gut feelings. Once in place, BI tools will let you lead by example.

BI tools, like self-service analytics, will also give you the chance to continuously improve. By tracking KPIs to measure the impact of your decisions and plans, you can refine, reshape, and revise plans as your organisation progresses towards its goals.

Breakdown silos with your BI tools

Lastly, you can use your business intelligence to breakdown organisational siloes, which will help to create a culture where data can be readily shared, with more communication and collaboration. For example, business decisions often happen in the c-suite, while data analysis happens in a dedicated team, and sales operates by itself. If you can break down these siloes and share data between teams, different parts of your organisation will benefit. According to an MIT report, many successful organisations share data tools with frontline workers, allowing them to approach customer support and sales with new methods, improving results and employee satisfaction too.

Having a data culture can empower your staff in new ways and unlock additional value from your data.