Faster, Better, More Accurate Decisions: Super-Charge Your Intuition with Data

We’ve surrounded ourselves with data technologies but what does it really mean to rely on data for making a decision?

Decision-Making Dilemma

Technology promises to make our lives easier, more productive, and better, but every day we’re still confronted by hundreds of decisions at work. From emails and texts to Facebook and Slack, we have a dozen communications systems constantly pinging us. It’s hard to prioritize.

Today’s professionals want to know:

• What should I spend my time on right now?
• What questions should I ask?
• What should I keep doing?
• What should I stop doing?
• How can I have a real impact on this business?

To help answer these questions, you’ve probably used various analytics platforms within your department and found partial answers. To get a more complete answer, you would need to access at least a dozen data systems across Finance, Sales, Marketing, Accounts, and Operations. And since these systems don’t talk to each other, there’s still no way to know with certainty if you have a truly accurate answer.

In the face of limited resources, most professionals rely on their experience and intuition. While that will always be essential to help people figure out how to spend their time, there is an even better way to get all the data you need and make the best decisions that go beyond your hunches:

You can super-charge your intuition.

However, collecting and using more data to make better decisions is not as straightforward as as it seems.

Data-Driven Intuition vs. Intuition-Driven Data

Companies in every industry are constantly gathering data across a myriad of touchpoints — from website and advertising metrics to revenue and operations reports. While most businesses have no problem capturing data, they have no way to immediately take action on their data in real time.

Forrester reports that between 60 and 73 percent of all data within an enterprise goes unused. To make it usable, they have to be able convert it into something consumable by decision makers.

That’s because data is only as valuable as the insight it delivers. It’s not enough to capture data quickly and turn around narrow insights to solve a problem for one department. Your dashboards and reports are just confirming your theories and hunches. The true value of data can only be unlocked by making it actionable and available.

Compounding the issue is that first-party consumer data has never been more valuable. With the imminent deprecation of the third-party cookie, companies collecting high-quality first-party data are sitting on a goldmine. How they use it will be a key factor for determining who will win in a post-cookie world.

What if the data was driving everyone’s theories and hunches — not the other way around? Data can guide you on where to start and what you should do beyond your hunches.

Once you decide to focus on something, you can make data-driven decisions to solve problems in multiple ways. Decisions driven by data have the power to change minds because there is an established single source of truth that everyone can access and act upon. It might be hard to prioritize your time, but data can help pinpoint where to focus and what to do.