Leaders looking for success with data & analytics must drive a cultural shift

EMBRACING data and analytics is more than simply investing in technology, it requires a cultural shift.

Organizations that can facilitate this change quickly are not only able to get a leg up on the competition but are also able to deliver better returns to stakeholders.

Obviously, influencing change is hard, which is why many business leaders keen to leverage data and analytics are struggling.

Gartner’s Data & Analytics Summit 2020 in Sydney aims to help such leaders better understand not just how to set a cultural change in motion but also learn what the best practices are when it comes to collecting, storing, governing, and managing data.

Ahead of the event, Tech Wire Asia caught up with Summit Chair and Gartner Senior Director Analyst Melody Chien. Her opening and closing keynote sessions are focused on explaining why and how business leaders can start thinking about rewiring their organization’s culture to embrace data and analytics.

In order for data and analytics to truly deliver exciting insights, staff need to interact with one another and find ways to share data across the enterprise.

“Culture will change and improve to support analytics when leaders start emphasizing the need for data literacy.

“When people understand the impact on the enterprise, of data that they’re responsible for capturing and storing, they’ll start being more mindful about its accuracy and quality, and ultimately, care about it more broadly.”

For organizations that are just starting to build a culture that embraces data and analytics, there is an incentive to bring data quality and governance into the focus as well, because ultimately, quality affects reliability and governance leads to responsibility.

Chien reminds us that in the (very) near future, all staff will be augmented by technology — artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and others are beginning to transform work by taking away the mundane and refocusing people on big picture tasks. Hence, there’s a need to drive a cultural change quickly.

Since an organization’s leadership is expected to drive the change, the summit in Sydney will share thoughts and ideas about the role that leaders can play, strategies they can use, and tactics they can employ to accelerate the impending shift.

“We need a human-centric approach to data and analytics. The technology is one part of embracing digital but the soft way, driven by leaders and focused on helping people open their minds to data and analytics, is something we must adopt.”

In the coming months, leaders that can deliver change effectively will win big. Those that continue to struggle will find that they’re unable to get their data and analytics projects to deliver on promised returns. That’s the reality.

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