How To Build a Data Culture and Why Companies Should Do It

Saphyte Team

2 min read

Updated: November 16th, 2022

Data culture is an important part of any modern business. Find out why you should do it and how you can start building one.

If your company isn’t collecting data from its activities— information you gain from customers, your sales results, etc— then you should start doing it. Why? Because there are insights you can gain from them that would let you make smarter, better decisions for your business.

Knowing how to build a data culture is the only way to get these insights. So how do you start one? Below, we list down why data culture is important and the steps to start yours.

Why Data Culture is Important

Here are the reasons why companies should form their own data culture:

It allows them to spot trends and collect insights

Data analysis allows companies to identify market trends and trends in customer behavior. This lets them adjust their strategies to respond to these trends and drive growth and differentiation.

It helps them make better business decisions

Unearthing useful data lets businesses make better decisions. For example, knowing which channel customers respond to the most lets the business know which channel to focus on. This helps them ease bottlenecks and improve customer experience.

It makes employees more productive

Employees feel more empowered when their actions are producing results. When data guides employee routine, they’re more likely to spend less time on basic tasks and more on strategizing. This makes them feel less like a machine and more like a human.

Steps to Start Building Your Data Culture

Here are four steps to consider when building your own data culture:

Staffing: Choose your team

If there’s “location, location, location,” a business adage for location, there should be one for staffing too. Choosing the right people for a task is extremely important, especially when introducing new cultures to your company.

This is why when starting a data culture, you need to know who are the right people for the job.  The right team members must have a collaborative mindset. They must be from different departments with different skills and abilities— soft or technical. They must also bring different perspectives from the organization.

Include managers, data engineers, developers, and machine learning architects if possible.

Have the right technology

To collect data from your organization’s activities, a technology is needed to fast-track tasks. But starting from scratch (building your own technology) may sound good, but it’s extremely expensive and often impractical.

Getting an off-the-shelf technology is highly suggested, especially for small businesses. Choosing the right vendor is also equally important so you can rest assured that their technology will meet your needs and expectations. Also, get one that provides free training and implementation.

Start with the easy tasks

After forming a team and getting a technology, you might be tempted to dive into complex data to get immediate results. But it’s better to start with the easy tasks first.

This allows you to form your own best practices to refine your team’s workflows and learn more about how to integrate and use data into your organizational efforts. The easy tasks can include: collecting customer emails from your website or launching a drip email marketing campaign that customizes emails according to customers’ interests.

Evaluate

A critical step that many organizations often overlook is the evaluation of their strategy. Building a data culture often takes years to perfect. But you cannot improve your strategy without evaluating its performance first.

Here, you need to assess every step of the way what works and what doesn’t. Make tweaks here and there. And understand why something is or isn’t working.

Build your data culture now

To start building your data culture, you need to form the right team. This requires getting people with a collaborative mindset, technical skills, and varied perspectives about your organization.

You need to also get a technology to help your team perform their tasks. Getting an off-the-shelf system is recommended, especially for small businesses that can’t afford to develop their own technology. But make sure that the technology you’re getting and the vendor selling it can meet your needs and expectations.

When starting your tasks, choose the easy ones first. This allows you to form your best practices and build a data culture momentum. Last but not least, evaluate your performances and strategies. This allows you to create better workflows and get better results.

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