Gambling your company’s future value on intuition isn’t a sustainable strategy—but getting what you need out of data can seem overwhelming. Here’s how you can tackle data technologies to meet business goals.

In recent years, as terms like “big data” and “real-time analytics” have invaded the enterprise lexicon, numerous analyses have reinforced that data-driven companies tend to outperform competitors. A recent Deloitte survey, for example, states that “Organizations that reported having the strongest cultural orientation to data-driven insights and decision-making are twice as likely to have reported exceeding business goals in the past 12 months.”    

Despite this seemingly obvious fact, many companies still rely on intuition and questionable judgement—rather than data-driven decisioning—for much of their problem solving.  

This can happen for a number of reasons: cultures that prioritize praising “winners” rather than those who make the best decisions; IT operations that don’t make data accessible or easy to interpret; the constant pressure to ship; the tendency to privilege personal experience over data; and so on. 

Despite the challenges, building a data-driven company is not out of reach. Asking the right questions—and getting the right data to the right people—is the hard part. In this article, we’ll examine five practical steps a company can take to create a data-driven culture.