“Data-Analysis” has been on the latest trend of management and decision-making for companies in recent years. The improvement of technology has made collecting and analyzing data more efficient and precise. However, how do a company makes the best use of its information assets? In this article, the authors together provided some solutions.

To begin with, the article stated that in order to make better decisions, firms should be “truly” data-driven, and this means creating “a culture of evidence” rather than “a culture of advocacy”. Having a handful of data report is not enough. Instead, the right procedure of using data should be established and solidified. The article indicates that the manager should only determine “what to test” and leave the rest of the work to data analyst who understands the business well.

The data-driven decision making method does have risk, such as turning down a senior manager’s project plan or going against with the company’s existed strategies. Nonetheless, it is an essential step for organizations to reach its ultimate goals. The biggest downsides of a gut-feeling decision making method is that it cannot correctly reflect or predict customers’ feelings or behaviors. Without evidence, what the company executives “feel” like the right thing to do may turns out to be an unnecessary approach or ineffective service.

As a person who had dealt with some aspects of data, I can related myself to the points made above. Over the summer, I was doing an internship program in Taiwan for an educational experience sharing platform. Our “products” are video-taped talks given by university students studying all over the world, and our “customer” are students who need more personal experiences and information to make their post-secondary decisions. As a startup social enterprise, I took on various roles and was involved in product team, marketing team, and even partook in decision makings. We used various tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Adwords to analyze the performance of the website and more importantly, how we can do better to improve page views.

I would classified the enterprise as a data-driven company. The CEO and manager simply determined the information necessary to be tested, and the marketing team will regularly come up with strategies according to the regular report. Decisions are solely based on data instead of personal opinions. For example, when we promoted our website to students in Malaysia, the marketing team examined the effectiveness of each post on Facebook to website performance every day. The executives trusted the analysts and did not interrupt any strategies the marketing team has developed because they are all based on data. Eventually, we boosted the sessions from Malaysia three times higher than it used to be.

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