Building a culture where data reigns involves people, process, and technology. It’s a journey that starts with understanding why a data culture matters, then continues down the road to folding data-driven decision making into all of the business’s teams and initiatives. 

Organizations today are faced with opportunities and risks, and need to make the best decisions possible. Implementing a data culture can help organizations become more agile, responsive to customer needs, and open to innovation. In this whitepaper, you’ll find out what to consider as you move your business toward a data-driven culture, and explore these four key topics within data culture: 

• Operating with trust 

• Democratizing insights 

• Increasing business agility 

• Applying intelligence 

Explore how other organizations have moved toward their own data cultures, and see how you can incorporate those insights into your own business.

Data tells us that a data culture matters

The digital revolution presents every business with unprecedented opportunity and risk. Cheap and abundant online resources promise new products, new markets, and new opportunities for richer customer relations. They also threaten heated competition and perpetual disruption. 

When we’re beset by change, it’s good to remember the unchanging core principles: Know your market. Focus on your customer. Perfect your offering, and be ready to adapt it to changing conditions. Seek efficiency. 

In other words, get your data together and use it well. Build a workplace culture around it. That will look very different depending on the people involved. If you provide the same set of technologies and data to two different teams with the objective to innovate, or solve a hard problem, you can get two very different outcomes. Different teams will need to align on their goals and their data to start building a successful culture. 

Culture is an accelerating agent in and of itself. According to McKinsey and Company’s Why data culture matters: “Culture can be a compounding problem or a compounding solution. When an organization’s data mission is detached from business strategy and core operations, it should come as no surprise that the results of analytics initiatives may fail to meet expectations. But when excitement about data analytics infuses the entire organization, it becomes a source of energy and momentum. The technology, after all, is amazing. Imagine how far it can go with a culture to match.” 

And remember: Using data is nothing new. Since the dawn of commerce, people have observed facts, figured out what matters, and sought patterns to leverage. Modern statistics dates to 1749, and data-powered management has radically raised global GDP for When we’re beset by change, it’s good to remember unchanging core principles. 01 over a century with ever-increasing sophistication. These are revolutionary, data-driven times we live in. We came to them because we used data well.

Why data culture has to scale, too

What does that look like? Let’s start with the magnitude of the opportunity. In 2002, digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity. Since then, the compounded annual growth rate of data owned by a typical corporation has been about 60%. Not only has the amount of data increased, it now comes from a more diverse set of sources, including browsers, sensors, smartphones and mobile devices, not to mention other computers. The compound annual growth rate of change is incalculable. 

Google thinks about these opportunities a lot. We were founded, after all, with a mission to organize all the world’s information, and over the years we’ve solved a number of fascinating problems around yielding insights and action from large amounts of different kinds of data—now done at blistering velocity.

We work to provide digital insights and the capability to take action to both consumers and enterprises, both in our advertising work with businesses and now, through the tools and services for data management and insights we offer at Google Cloud. We hear how our products are helping accelerate digital transformation and innovation at companies around the world, including ANZ, Mayo Clinic, Sanofi, UPS, and more. Take AirAsia as an example, who’re en route to becoming a “digital airline.” Their transformation is already helping 02 them extract new insights, become more agile, and deliver more personalized experiences so they can stand out in their industry. “We had to become a digital airline to offer customers more, personalize customer experiences and improve booking and ticketing,” says Nikunj Shanti, chief product officer at AirAsia. “We’ve gone from data management to data-driven decision making.”

The company has been able to make efficient decisions faster using Google Cloud, such as reducing food waste on flights using ML modeling.

We’ve also learned a number of lessons on internal organization to optimize on data, as well, both in our own journey and from helping our customers solve hard problems. Some of those lessons inform this ebook on why a data culture matters. It comes down to four key pillars: operating with trust, democratizing insights, increasing business agility, and applying intelligence.

There are several striking things about organizing for data operations at scale. Advances in the technologies surrounding data means there’s more access and easier manageability. Managing and working with data at scale is hard, and poses a new challenge when compared to working with data in the past; in many cases, this is balanced by today’s better process automation and tools to make sense of the data. Of course, more access means new challenges in security, in quality, and interpretability.

Great businesses are effective because they have great processes that make great products, reflecting great understanding and care for their customers. In other words, all great businesses have great internal cultures that produce these results. People adapt with curiosity and creativity. When appropriate, they challenge the status quo and innovate based on new insights. They leverage the power of data they are entrusted with, adapting and applying processes to generate new value from data.

That’s never been more true than today, when the titanic digital shifts bring into new and sharper focus the need to get culture right around collecting and using data at scale. Getting it right early on is important, because history shows us something else: Those working 03 Operate with trust Democratize insights Increase agility Apply intelligence toward new goals never turn down having more data, as long as it’s useful. Advances in cloud computing, data management, data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies aren’t slowing down. Neither should any business, in its hunger to change the world.