That puts a lot of pressure on the inspector to be quick — there’s no faster way to have people resent the time you spend “checking boxes” than to take a long time doing it.
A data-driven organization needs to establish workflows that take inspection information and share it with people, organizations, and systems that need it to make better decisions.
Suppose your company provides outsourced sanitization services. Your business workflow might start with a team sanitizing a building. Once they’ve done the work, they check the right boxes or collect other relevant data to prove that they’ve done a high-quality job.
I’m going to set aside the processes you have for your own scope of work. Let’s focus instead on the fact that, within a data-driven organization, the data you’ve collected needs to drive more action with broader scopes.
Let’s drill into that last bullet. I say “If you’re lucky” because the more your data gets used, the more value people get from it.
So, for instance, it’s good for a sales account manager to know that someone has sanitized her client’s building. That fact can drive her next actions. Since she uses the CRM application, that’s where the data needs to be for her to be well informed.
Similarly, It’s good for analysts to have your information available when they do customer analytics. They can use it to drive decisions about pricing, staffing, equipment, remediation, and other issues. Since they load up their tools with datasets taken from a data warehouse or data marts, they need your data to appear there. If it doesn’t, it has a lot less likelihood of showing up in their analysis. And if it doesn’t show up in their analysis, your business workflows hardly seem to exist.
The power of a workflow is ensuring that your actions — more precisely, the data you collect about the work you do — has an effect on other people’s understanding of the business. If, as the saying goes, 80% of success is showing up, then workflows are important because they make your data “show up.”
Having said that, I need to call out the fact that the data needs to be right.
I personally know account executives who would rather have no data about installations than to have unreliable data, because not knowing something is a lot less embarrassing than “knowing something that ain’t so,” as the saying goes.
That’s why high-quality data — which you’re going to get from digital collection in ways that you won’t get from paper-based processes — is so important.
Consider five things when trying to become more data-driven.
By putting your data into a wider context, you’ll be able to understand what’s happening throughout all of your business processes — which will lead to better decision making and a more data-driven organization.