It leads you to think that to become a data-driven company, you need to dig through your data and extract its value.
It’s what every single book I could find on data strategy propagates.
So, I made a list of the great companies I consider data-driven and then checked how they became data-driven.
CapitalOne didn’t become CapitalOne by digging through its data. Instead, they set out with a goal, the desire to understand deeply how to provide what kinds of credits to the right people, and invested years in collecting new data.
Amazon is famous for following the Six Sigma paradigm, first defining the process to optimize, then starting to collect the data, and only afterward optimizing it.
Netflix built their rating system with the sole purpose of gathering data on how much customers liked what movie, to then strategically recommend good ones.
The last company I worked at, Unite, built out a custom tracking system to base its North Star metric on that newly collected data. That data was then used in every single management meeting to steer the company.
Not a single one of those companies “dug through its data.” Having lots of data isn’t a prerequisite for becoming data-driven. In fact, looking at those examples, I’d say there’s no causation at all.
Companies become data-driven by understanding how they make their decisions and then strategically collect the right data.
If you go about it the other way around, you’ll likely miss the point.