How a Cloud Data Warehouse Can Help Build a Data-driven Culture

Data is crucial for every enterprise and for every department within it, from marketing and sales gaining a better understanding of the customer journey to finance teams running forecasts, logistics enabling an integrated supply chain, and post-sales support ensuring effective customer service.

It’s only possible to run a customer-centric enterprise if customer data drives your marketing messaging, product development, purchase journey, and supply chain. Identifying emerging trends, spotting risks and opportunities, and taking steps to mitigate the former and seize the latter requires you to crunch data to see what’s yet to come, and knowing what the competition is doing and positioning your enterprise to stay ahead of it also requires data.

To run this kind of data-powered enterprise, it’s not enough just to use data as another tool. You need a data-driven culture that bases every strategy on data insights, and that’s easier said than done.

Research shows that while 96% of companies have achieved successful business outcomes from data and AI initiatives, only 24% implemented data-driven cultures. It’s already taken as fact that business leaders play a key role in deploying a data-driven culture, but even they need help and support from appropriate tools. Here’s how a cloud data warehouse can help you along the path.

Ensure quality data

Garbage in, garbage out has been a mantra since long before the dawn of big data, and cloud data warehouses are the latest weapon to add to the struggle for quality data. A cloud data warehouse can include integrations that automatically pull your data from multiple sources and collect it all in a central location in the same accessible format.

Automated, integrated data gathering lowers the risks of manual errors creeping in and cuts the time spent on locating it, so leaders can spend more time viewing meaningful insights that drive better decision-making, and less time verifying data integrity. When you ensure that all your data is stored in the same format and is accessible to all your analytics tools, you also raise the quality and reliability of your data.

Spread data insights around generously

A data-driven culture might begin at the top, but it has to include all the managers and stakeholders throughout the organization if it’s going to succeed. A cloud data warehouse is resilient enough to scale up as soon as you request it, so that there’s no need to limit the number of users to avoid overwhelming the system.

As a centralized data storage point, a cloud data warehouse allows every department to take advantage of data-driven insights. There’s no reason for anyone to silo data into their own team fortress; cloud data warehouses encourage departments to share their information and collaborate more effectively, encouraging a sense of working together towards mutual goals which is one of the central benefits of a data-driven culture. By visualising the data stored in your cloud warehouse with managed Kibana you can unlock a wealth of insights that would be otherwise hidden from your Dev and Ops teams. A Kibana demo can be the first step to assisting your technicians with unlocking the insights that are required in order to make further improvements.

Democratize access to data insights

In a data-driven culture, there are no gatekeepers. You want all your employees to be able to serve themselves to data-driven insights and predictions without having to go through data science experts.

If only a few data scientists and analysts have the skills to use your analytics tools, you’ll end up with a serious bottleneck. Many employees may just decide not to bother with sending a query anyway, if it’s going to take that long to get an answer.

Fortunately, a good cloud data warehouse integrates with almost any business intelligence (BI) tools and machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) technologies. Choose ones which are intuitive and easy to use so employees can help themselves to insights and predictions without waiting for expert DS to run queries for them.

Keep queries moving at high speed

Markets, trends, and consumer demands change fast and your enterprise needs to keep up with them. A data-driven culture is of little use if the insights it produces are out of date, and sometimes “out of date” can occur in as little as a few days. With a cloud data warehouse, the most time-consuming tasks like selecting, visualizing, and interpreting data are all automated, reducing the amount of time down to just a few days or even hours, rather than weeks.

A cloud data warehouse also makes it easy to update databases and switch out tools, so that you can refresh your data whenever it seems necessary. They streamline data processing so that queries receive fast answers, ensuring your entire organization has an up to date understanding of markets, trends, and customer preferences.

Take advantage of advanced analytics

Here’s the harsh truth: simple analytics can’t cut it any more. A data-driven culture needs artificial intelligence (AI), ML, DL, and neural frameworks to extract the most meaning from big data sets and in the shortest amount of time.

A cloud data warehouse can support ad hoc analytics, high performance analytics, and semi-structured data analytics at scale, as well as traditional reporting and dashboards, so that your enterprise can dive deep into data from every angle.

The right tools can guide you to a data-driven culture

A data driven culture is the key to future-proofing your organization, and it needs to come from the top. With the help of a cloud data warehouse, business leaders can ensure that data quality remains high, data insights and advanced analytics tools are widely accessible, queries receive swift responses, and that departments collaborate to spread a data-driven culture across the enterprise.