Performance-based decision making for business involves looking at your business data before strategizing or committing to actions.
It’s about understanding your strengths and weaknesses as an organization to have greater confidence in the outcomes of any strategies you might be considering.
Whether that’s changing staffing levels, developing a new product line, considering a merger or acquisition or simply to reengineer a process that causes lots of customer complaints.
The data within your business provides a lot of information about your organization – functionality, productivity, profitability, competitiveness, responsiveness, etc.
With computerization of the organization, came massive scale data collection, which means that today everything done within a business is monitored and the data collected.
As companies have moved online and into The Cloud, even more data is available to you for performance-based decision making.
So where do you start? There is so much data!
The Business Performance Data that Will Help with Decision Making
Not all decisions are equal.
The information needed to help you decide which pair of socks you’ll wear today, is completely different to the information you need to assess whether a prospective company is the right candidate for a merger.
You need to start by knowing what questions you want to answer.
Once you’ve got an idea of the “domain knowledge” you’ll need, it gives you indicators on where to find the data.
For example, let’s look at two different ways for making a decision about what colour a new product should be.
The new product expands the features of a base product you already sell successfully.
Using Market Research for Making a Decision
Using market research, you’d likely use focus groups, questionnaires and possibly current colour trending data to help you choose a colour that has current popular appeal.
The decision is made using evidence sourced from reliable and professional sources, some that may be internal to your business.
Using Performance-Base Decision Making
Using a performance-based decision making approach, you would looking through your customer database to find out what the best selling colour for the based product was (this is a product that extends a base product, so it makes sense that any existing customers would want it to match what they already own).
The colour for the new product is then decided based on the volume of sales for the base product; and the colour for that, that sold the most.
No matter what decision-making strategy you use, you will need to share your evidence and proof to support your choice with others.
Compelling Others with Your Performance-Based Decision
Now that you have your data and have found the key messages you want to communicate.
The data needs to be put together in a way that is easily digestible for your colleagues, managers or the board.
Data visualisation (aka visual analytics) is now an integral part of the new way of communicating to influence and persuade in business – combining visualisation, human factors, and data analysis.
Given the “real-time” nature of today’s data, data visualisation displayed on a digital dashboard makes the most sense for progressive companies.
A digital dashboard is a tool you use for displaying data in easy to understand representations.
It acts as an interface between data and business intelligence.
When well done, It presents data and metrics that are a representation of the current state of business operations and is a great solution for continuous monitoring.
Team Semantia developed a digital dashboard for a client who needed as close to real-time KPI reporting as their current system allowed.
The dashboard used the data from diverse internal systems and made those core analytics available throughout the business to be displayed as performance metrics for decision making.
What is the data telling you? Base your business decisions on data performance!
Semantia works with your team to develop digital dashboards and data visualisation technology for businesses who want to improve processes, track and monitor operations, move towards performance-based decision making and big data analysis.
Discover how your company could be improving profitability with performance-based decision making. For a confidential discussion about metrics and data visualization Call 1300 766 328.
