In this era of digital transformation, businesses have access to the data they need to make smarter business decisions, the cloud computing power to crunch massive sets of data, and the analytics tools they need to convert data and visualise it as business insights. Any business that is not already making a shift towards data-driven decision-making risks falling behind the market and its customers.

What is data-driven decision-making?

Data-driven decision-making is all about using hard data to inform your business decisions, rather than relying on guesswork and intuition. It is a rigorous process of gathering, analysing, and interpreting data relevant to the key performance indicators (KPIs) in your business, then converting it into actionable insights.

By using facts, metrics, and data to guide strategic business decisions, you can make smarter choices that align with your goals and targets. Data-driven decision-making means that you’re making your decisions based on real-time insight into the trends driving your business and the market in which you operate—rather than depending only on subjective experience and expertise.

Data gives you a more objective way of measuring business performance, enabling you to benchmark what already exists. With insight into current cloud spending from cutting-edge FinOps tools and practices, for example, you can determine whether there is an opportunity to optimise costs through measures such as switching off idle instances or migrating workloads to a different provider.

You can use your data to make robust forecasts about the results you hope to achieve, then use real-world data to validate your choices. This allows you to constantly measure and optimise performance, allowing your business to achieve better and better results over time. It also brings more transparency and accountability to decision-making.

From reactive to proactive decisions

With the support of a knowledgeable data science team, data-driven decision-making can guide your business to higher levels of growth. Tuning into data and the insights it yields allows you to spot trends in the market or your business’s performance at an earlier stage, enabling you to make more proactive decisions rather than closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

For example, if you see early signs of runaway telecoms or cloud spending in one of your business units, you can act before massive bills come your way. You can also tap into data-driven insights to innovate by, for example, identifying new customer behaviors and expectations earlier than your competitors.

Reorienting your business around data-driven decision-making

Here are some of the first steps a business can take to accelerate its move towards data-driven decision-making:

1. Determine which KPIs and goals are important to you: Get a clear picture of which goals you want to achieve and how you will benchmark success.
2. Understand which data you need: Identify which data you need to inform your KPIs and which sources and systems you can get it from.
3. Collect and analyse the data: Invest in the tools, processes, and people you need to ingest, transform and package data as business insights.
4. Create a culture of data-driven decision-making: Encourage a culture of sharing data and insights. Make data available to support smarter operational and strategic decisions throughout the business.

At a time of multi-cloud deployment, remote and distributed workforces, and relentless cost pressure, data-driven FinOps practices can help any business gain better control over its IT spending. Get in touch to find out how our cutting-edge practices and experts can guide your business to reduced wastage and optimised performance.