Data-driven decision-making involves using facts to guide business strategy.
With Data, the Data analysts can gain valuable insights, check their assumptions, understand opportunities and challenges, support an objective, help make a plan, and more.
Here are 5 essential skills that Data Analysts need in order to help businesses make data-driven decisions and result in great outcome.
Skill 1 : Curiosity
As we continue learning about data, Curiosity helps to notice Patterns and relationships in everyday life.
Skill 2: Understanding Context
Analysts take a step further from thinking and use context to research for answers, make predictions, and eventually draw conclusions based on what they have discovered. This is a natural process and a great starting step.
Skill 3: Having a Technical mindset
We all have instincts and gut feelings. Data Analysts have them too, but, they train themselves to take a more technical approach to explore and build on those gut instincts.
How to do this?
By always seeking out the facts, putting them to work through analysis, and using the insights they gain to make informed decisions.
Skill 4: Data Design
Designing data is all about organising the data in a logical way so that it is easy to access, understand, and make the most out of available information.
Note: It’s important to keep in mind that data design doesn’t just apply to databases. This kind of thinking can work with all sorts of real-life situations too. The basic idea is — If you make decisions that are informed by data, you are more likely to make more informed and effective decisions.
Skill 5: Data Strategy
This step includes — the people, processes, and tools to solve a problem.
Data strategy is one of the most important steps as it gives you a high-level view of the path you need to take to achieve given goals.
Also, data-driven decision-making isn’t a one-person job. It’s more likely to be successful if everyone is on the same page. Therefore, it’s important to make sure specific procedures are in place and that the technology used is aligned with the data-driven strategy.
Now you know how these five essential analytical skills work towards making better, data-driven decisions.
Adapted from Google Data Analytics Certification — Foundations of Data
