Data does not have to be complicated. Simply stated, data is useful information that you collect to support organizational decision-making and strategy and is vital in any industry.
The list below shares 11 reasons why data is important and what you can do with it!
- Improve your Business: Data will help you to improve the quality of your business by allowing you to measure and take action appropriately to accelerate your business.
- Keep Track of Everything: Good data allows companies to establish baselines, benchmarks, and goals to keep moving forward. Because data allows you to measure, you will be able to establish baselines, find benchmarks, and set performance goals. Additionally, collecting data will allow your organization to set goals for performance and celebrate your successes when they are achieved.
- Quality Monitoring: Data allows you to monitor the health of important systems in your organization and by utilizing data for quality monitoring, organizations are able to respond to challenges before they become full-blown crises. Effective quality monitoring will allow your organization to be proactive rather than reactive and will support the organization to maintain best practices over time.
- Find Solutions to your Problems: Data allows organizations to more effectively determine the root cause of problems within the business. With proper data, you will be able to visualize relationships between what is happening in different locations, departments, and systems. Looking at your data points side-by-side allows you to develop more accurate theories, and put into place more effective solutions to solve your problems.
- Get Results: Data allows companies to measure the effectiveness of a given strategy. When strategies are put into place to overcome a challenge, collecting data will allow you to determine how well your solution is performing, and whether or not your approach needs to be tweaked or changed over the long term.
- Make Informed Decisions: Data is knowledge. Good data provides indisputable evidence, while anecdotal evidence, assumptions, or abstract observation might lead to wasted resources due to taking action based on an incorrect conclusion. This is why it’s so important to collect information well and effectively.
- Back-Up Your Arguments: Data is a key component of systems advocacy. Utilizing data will help present a strong argument for any changes you need to make to your processes, business, and more. Whether you are advocating for increased funding from public or private sources or making the case for changes in regulation, illustrating your argument through the use of data will allow you to demonstrate why changes are needed.
- Be Strategic in Your Approach: Data increases efficiency. Effective data collection and analysis will allow you to direct scarce resources where they are most needed and repurpose your funds appropriately. If an increase in significant incidents is noted in a particular service area, this data can be dissected further to determine whether the increase is widespread or isolated to a particular area. If the issue is isolated, training, staffing, or other resources can be deployed precisely where they are needed, as opposed to system-wide. Data will also support organizations to determine which areas should take priority over others.
- No More Guessing: Data will help you explain (both good and bad) decisions to your stakeholders. Whether or not your strategies and decisions have the outcome you anticipated, you can be confident that you developed your approach based on good solid data, not guesses.
- Know What You Are Doing Well: Data allows you to replicate areas of strength across your business. Data analysis will support you to identify high-performing programs, service areas, and people. Once you identify your high-performers, you can study them in order to develop strategies to assist programs, service areas, and people that are low-performing.
- Access Resources Around You: Your company probably already has most of the data and expertise you need to begin analysis. But, why not take it a step further with better visualization and a 360-degree understanding and view of all your data with Chameleon BI? Find out more with us and get better reports with your data today!
