How Can Nonprofits Switch to a Data-Informed Culture? Essay Example

The habits of decision making are in most cases acquired through trial-error approach. The culture of an organization must influence behaviors for decision making and encouragement of data application such as ‘big data’ is responsible for enhanced operational decision making. The implication of “data driven business decision” is gathering and analyzing data that is thence applicable in the process of decision making. Such decisions are based on data analysis as opposed to the use of pure intuition. Special skills are requisite in “data driven business decision” on top of other ordinary skills needed in decision making (Kanter, 2011).

Managers in organization that embrace this approach are rewarded because of incorporating meaningful data in their decision making. Organizations have a duty to embrace skills of data driven decision making so that they can derive the benefits associated with analytics of big data. However, not all situations of “data driven business decision” can lead to success. Managers have a role of understanding the process of analysis and incorporating results in their situations. The decisions that were made earlier can be enhanced by “data driven business decision” and therefore, earlier judgments must be reserved to await the facts from data. Sometimes data is used in the wrong way such as what happened at Microsoft Company an IBM. The internal market study conducted at Microsoft produced executive results that enhanced the decisions that had been made earlier (Kanter, 2011). When the decision failed to work, the company was protected. Data driven decision making requires accurate background knowledge of the data resources and the best approach of working with such data, the use of metadata, identification of available data and the new data that needs to be captured.

References

Kanter, B., (2011). “How Can Nonprofits Switch to a Data-Informed Culture?” URL http://www.bethkanter.org/switch-data-driven/