Today’s business leaders are expected to be data-driven. Data-driven leadership means the use of data is seen as an important source of input when making decisions. Intuition and past experiences still play some role, but now leaders are expected to seek evidence from data to support their decisions. The good news is that there is more data than ever at leaders use. And the amount of data is growing faster than ever.
Actually, there is overwhelmingly much data. So much data that it’s beyond comprehension. And that might actually be a problem. How to find, store, analyze, and make decisions on the relevant data for your specific context? And how to do it with limited resources?
Luckily there are tools to help to interpret the data. Let’s have a look at the available options for different uses.
As always selecting the right tool depends on the job at hand. If you want to split a board, a hammer won’t do. However, here are some popular tools that are commonly used for data-driven leadership:
BI platforms such as Tableau, Power BI, and QlikView are great for data visualization, reporting, and analytics. With such tools leaders can access, analyze, and share data in real-time. They are best at use in Ad-Hoc situations when something happens and a leader needs to react fast. On the other hand, the data is more reactive and not looking toward future success.
Data warehousing tools like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are used to store, organize and analyze large amounts of data. With such tools leaders can access and query large datasets, and identify patterns and trends in the data. These tools aren’t the best for learning how your team is doing or what is your company’s current situation.
Services like Informatica, Collibra, Alation, and SAP Data Governance provide a centralized location for managing data access and use. They help leaders to ensure that the data is accurate, reliable, and accessible to the right people. These services are best suitable for large enterprises.
Services like TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, and PyTorch allow leaders to analyze large amounts of data. They can be used to make predictions, identify risks, and inform strategic decision-making. To use such services you need to have quite some experience and knowledge about data science.
Project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira help leaders to manage and track progress on data-driven projects. These are at best in real-time management of data-driven operations for project work.
Priorit.io is easy to use tool for collecting and analyzing data. But it is even more than that. It is the only holistic solution on the market to measure all four key elements of any business’s success: Capability, Efficiency, Culture, and Leadership. All this is grounded in financial success through Dun and Bradstreet API. So you get to see how development on any measured element affects under-the-line in almost real-time. Besides Priorit.io is affordable and easy to start with.
Priorit.io combines the best features of survey, business intelligence, data analysis, and HR products, adds some juicy bits, and comes out as a unique data-driven leadership SaaS tool. A tool that you can get free.