Using Automation to Scale Data-Driven Decision Making

Data-driven decision making is the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting upon data tied to measurable outcomes, goals, or key performance indicators (KPIs). Companies today have more access to, and are generating, more data than ever before—but not all organizations have reached the tipping point to fuel truly significant data-driven decision making across the entirety of their company.  

That some companies are still a bit behind is not surprising either—let’s take a look at large, global enterprises as an example. If you were to map data-driven decision making on a maturity curve, the large companies bought into the Big Data trends years (really decades) ago. These organizations invested heavily in infrastructure changes to collect the data, digital warehousing solutions to hold the data, and also in the human capital required to help make sense of that data. 

These organizations now leverage a massive tech stack to empower the notion of creating strategies around the stories hidden in the numbers. And it works really, really well. All their internal and external systems send data to a centralized location, they have teams of people responsible for aggregating, structuring, and analyzing the data—pumping out memos, reports, presentations, and dashboards in an effort to empower more and more people to use data to inform their next move. 

Where does that leave smaller and medium-sized businesses though? Are they really out in the cold? Well, kind of. If a smaller company wanted to mimic the strategies of these large global enterprises, they would need to build a project around connecting all of their data sources ($). They would need to build, maintain, and finance a data warehousing solution ($$). Most importantly they would need to hire a team of data analysts and data scientists to reduce the risk of misinterpretation and make the data actionable enough to inform strategy, while mitigating the risk associated with bad data ($$$).  

Even if these smaller companies could afford these first few steps—finding a great data analyst and/or scientist, that’s affordable, can be next to impossible these days. The largest, most competitive, highest paying organizations in the world continue clamoring over these folks—and even still within those companies, those people can already be stretched too thin. Quite simply, there isn’t enough supply, for the data-thirsty demand of businesses in the modern world.  

So how can SMBs deploy true data-driven decision making? 

Automation. 

While hearing the terms automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) still, for some, create vivid thoughts about robots, lasers, and Skynet—the truth is AI-augmented automation tools have a place in the workplace—and using these solutions to make data actionable is a no brainer.  

Many fancy marketing campaigns may have over-sold AI technologies over the years—leading to largely misaligned expectations versus what’s actually possible. But the cool thing is, the reality is now that many companies are using AI/ML technologies to help scale their operations, customer support, sales, and even engineering processes.  

Using advanced technologies including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning modeling, coupled with the data being generated across commonly utilized cloud-enabled tools offers an interesting solution to increasing the breadth of data-driven decision-making capabilities. 

Imagine, with a few clicks, connecting the tools you use every day and having a personalized, automated data analyst watching your data stream 24/7/365. What would they find? What would they tell you? Could you become the most efficient, lean, mean, value creating machine? We think so. 

At Peoplelogic, we provide automated prescriptive guidance and insights from the data you and your teams are creating in tools like Slack, Office 265, GSuite, Zoom, and many, many more. With a few clicks—your team can scale their data expertise and feel empowered that the decisions they make are rooted in data and fact, not solely gut and experience.  

If you are an employee, take ownership of your schedule and get insights and recommendations to optimize your day-to-day. For managers, receive managerial best-in-class recommendations that can help keep you and your team engaged, refreshed, and on track to hit your goals. And as a leader, get a holistic understanding of how work gets done at your company—where the bottlenecks exist, automatically flag potential risks, prevent burnout, identify and keep the most profitable customers, and get automated recommendations and insights that keep growth moving in the right direction. 

More simply put, empower everyone in your organization to become data-driven decision makers with the help of automation. Augment their talents and abilities by providing a contextual layer that prevents the risk of data misinterpretation. Don’t worry about changing your infrastructure, we do all the heavy lifting for you—we connect to your tools, aggregate the data in a centralized location, and do the analysis for you. We provide you with the right insight, at the right time, so you can continue to make the most impactful decisions to move the needle forward. 

If you want to elevate your company with data-driven decision making, you can. If you want to do it in a cost-effective, frictionless way—give Peoplelogic a shot. You can get started today with a 30-day free trial.