How decision making impacts an organization.
Good decision making is the cornerstone of any successful company. This is especially true in today’s world, where everyday companies must make countless, crucial decisions and are often under great pressure and uncertainty.
It’s all about the data
Most companies rely on their real-time and historical data — which is collected via various sources and presented to them in Excel-based reports and plans — to guide them in their decision making.
However, when executives and key stakeholders look at these static reports and try to make sense of them in order to make strategic decisions, problems arise.
- Often or not, these reports and plans are hard to decipher, no longer accurate or even feasible.
- Decision makers find themselves in limbo, literally looking at their plans, unable to decide what to do, resulting in “decision waste” — you know, that waffling, quick last minute, uninformed decisioning that happens in every company.
- The result of this decision-making gap is that plans and business decisions are not driven by data, nor aligned with KPIs and business goals — often leading to below par productivity, performance, and profitability.
Micro and macro decisions are made every day in large companies with complex data interrelationships that no one can visualize. This leads to poor, uninformed decisions that cost companies billions.
And it’s costing companies more than money — it’s costing them time, personnel, and great ideas.
Big data. Big deal?
In the age of big data, we tend to operate on the idea that more information is a good thing. The only problem is we have to work out which data is relevant. We already know “every business decision must be driven by data”, but forward looking strategies and great ideas or innovations need to be supported with insightful metrics.
No matter what’s happened in the past, good or bad, analysis and insight of real time data have become the competitive advantage of successful organizations.
However, for data to be fully understood and for your communication to be effective, companies need a powerful data visualization tool that helps them interpret the data more easily and effectively — and this is where tools like Excel fall short.
Get your data in line
Since the bulk of data generated today is usually unstructured data, organizations (probably like yours) must find ways to structure, manage, analyze and present it quickly so that they can act on the data and make those important business decisions sooner. Your data is your company’s lifeblood.
Traditionally the’ data analyst’ has the key responsibility in providing such insight across the enterprise and often has to transform the information gathered into visualizations and dashboards that are intended to be more digestible and easier to translate.
However, unless these dashboards are easy to interpret and drill down into to extract the correct takeaways that influence business decisions, analysts must explain them via written reports, phone meetings, or video walkthroughs. One step forward and two back 🙄
And that’s assuming you have a team of data experts on hand who can decipher massive data sets and then turn these key insights into understandable reports on command.
It’s time to take the guesswork out of decisions
Q: So how exactly do we close the gap between the skills and data understanding of the expert analyst and the pressed-for-time, strategy-focused executive?
A: By empowering your organization with the right technology that helps uncover, convey and deliver insights to all areas of your business for better decision making.
The right tool will
- connect ideas to actions and strategy
- filter out the noise and highlight the important data
- help the audience to understand how one decision connects to or impacts others
- translate the complex into simple, concise action steps for non data experts and stakeholders
- encourage and facilitate knowledge sharing, collaboration, and more transparent channels of communication
- enable a shared understanding of strategic decisions
With access to the tools you need to automate and scale insight throughout the enterprise, the delay in knowledge sharing and data understanding will be eliminated…as will the decision waste. No more silos, duplicated work, wasted time, or frustration ✌️.
See the bigger picture
From pushing or expiring the wrong product to not being able to connect information across department siloes, to disconnected strategies that delay growth or put companies at risk, these decisions make or break organizations.
Our audience-centric software helps decision-makers in enterprise companies see every interrelationship and make agile, informed decisions based on consolidated, real time data pushed or pulled from point solution tools.
What was once too complex to see or understand is boiled down in SharpCloud.
