Now you know what Decision Intelligence (DI) is, and the impact it can have on businesses of all shapes and sizes. To jog your memory, DI is a form of artificial intelligence that combines both humans and machines to arrive at a decision that creates agility and drives a business forward. Likely, you are imagining what this might look like in your organization and all its limitless possibilities. Before you get too excited, though, you need to think about how you’re actually going to get there because unfortunately, it doesn’t just “magically” happen.

What It Actually Takes to Make Decision Intelligence Work

Luckily, we have some tips for managing a successful DI implementation that we’re happy to share. These tips are critical components that revolve around creating a culture that embraces data. Focusing on your people is key to evolving how you make decisions and ensuring success with the DI process. Let’s take a look.

Break Down Silos Through Real Collaboration

Organizational silos are the opposite of workplace collaboration and create barriers to sharing data that make it hard for leaders to get a true picture of a company. Recent analyses show that data silos continue to cost mid-size enterprises millions annually through duplicated work, delayed decisions, and lost productivity, with employees still spending significant time chasing information across disconnected systems. Silos make decisions harder because people don’t have access to the right data that supports data-driven decision making. Seems simple, right? Maybe, but overcoming silos rarely is.

One tried and true remedy for combating silos is collaboration. Proactive leaders seek to unify teams so that they freely share knowledge and data. Having more discussions together around the data instinctively leads to more informed decision-making. The key to fighting the silo mentality is to fully understand what’s causing the silos in the first place. Are people protective for a reason? Nervous about looking bad? Literally don’t have the answers? Don’t understand each other? Once you figure out why, then work on breaking down the walls to get a free flow of information and resources across the organization.

Tie Every Decision Back to Vision and Goals

Aligning your organizational vision and goals with your DI processes is an obvious one but needs to be mentioned. Apply a framework to your DI strategy so you get decisions that consistently match up with the path you’re aiming for. You’ll see a greater chance of success this way. Look to bring in the insights that help achieve the organization’s vision and goals.

For example, put together executive reporting dashboards that have a direct tie to the company’s annual and strategic goals. In other words, match the dashboard’s KPIs with your company’s overall success metrics. This way you’re not blindly making decisions without any context or direction, while also ensuring the DI process and everyone involved is aligned with corporate values.

Build a Culture That Actually Uses Data

We tend to throw around this term a lot, and for good cause. It may be a buzzword, but when businesses commit to it, digital transformation begins. A data-driven culture empowers users to not only rapidly access data, but also “play” with it to gain new insights. It may seem obvious, but companies that prioritize data-driven decision making achieve better, more accurate decisions. This is partly because they make a point of having the data needed for the decision-making process in the first place.

Data is the backbone of every company, so it’s essential that processes are supported by a data-driven culture. A successful DI strategy is impossible without one. Having an integrated approach that gives you reliable, timely insights at your fingertips is fundamental to a solid foundation for creating a true data-driven culture.

Make the Data Trustworthy Enough to Act On

Piggybacking off our last key component, trusting the data is crucial to a data-driven culture and, in turn, implementing a successful DI strategy. As organizations continue to add more and more data, managing all that data becomes tough. 74% of business leaders have held back a decision because they did not know what data to trust. We hear almost daily from clients that “If we can’t trust the data then we lose credibility inside the organization.” This couldn’t be more spot-on. However, there are steps to building trust in the data, and one is by ensuring you own reliable high-quality data.

Trust is a fickle little thing. It can break in an instant. However, it’s one of the items that everyone unanimously agrees on. When there are manual processes to assemble reporting, there is a huge opportunity for poor data integrity or inaccuracy to leach in unknowingly. The key with a business intelligence initiative, like a DI strategy, is to automate all reporting so that it can be trusted to be accurate, repeatable, and sustainable. Therefore, utilizing automation tools not only increases efficiency and saves time and money, but it is also great at building trust in the data.

Quick data-driven decision making in business is extremely important in today’s fast-moving world. With the complexity of decisions we’re making increasing at a rapid pace, we need more efficient methods of doing so. Decision Intelligence, fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, is the near-future way for businesses to make data-driven decisions that get ahead of competitors. Speak to one of our expert advisors at BT Partners if you have questions on how to successfully implement Decision Intelligence in your workplace.