What does it mean to be “data-driven”?

Day after day, we see an increasing number of companies pushing new or upgraded products that are “AI-powered” or “driven by AI”. Meanwhile, every other LinkedIn profile extolls the “data-driven” approaches they and their team took to enhance corporate shareholder value.

While I understand the necessity of ensuring your resume ticks off all the buzzword checkmarks, I have to wonder if these people actually understand what it means to be a data-driven organization.

“Data-driven” is not a capability. Anyone with a Tableau license can open up a Viz, chuck a few filters on some data, and claim it means anything. No, “data-driven” is a mindset.

With any data analysis, the very first step is to decide what story you want to tell. Say that, like me, you want to show how professional translation of website content will generate more clicks and more purchases than machine-translated content. 

I think we all generally know professional translation is higher in quality, more effectively localized for a specific target market, and more consistent in its style and formatting; but proving these things requires quantification.

Once we know what story we want to tell, then we understand what data we will need to tell it. The need for this data then defines our tasks: categorizing the website’s content by its translation method, gathering metrics such as page visits and purchase counts, cross tabulating by dates when those content categories transitioned from machine to human-based translation, etc., etc.

Tools like Tableau make visualizing data much easier, but at the core of it, we ourselves must start and finish the lifecycle of that data. Tableau will not gather the data for us; it will not tell us which filters, sorting, or tabulations are best; and it most certainly will not give a PowerPoint presentation to our boss on what to do next. That is our job.

By treating “data-driven” as a mindset and not just the ability to handle data with dedicated software, we extend the usefulness of data visualization beyond developing insight, ultimately leading to quantifiable action. A data-driven member of a team is constantly envisioning scenarios in which data can be used to make verifiable, measurable decisions, as well as how those decisions can drive the future actions of the team. 

Though I am at the end of the Data Saber Program, I am confident that I will remain a truly data-driven member of my team for the rest of my tenure.