Are you using a data driven IT strategy to enhance operational efficiency? New generations of data analytics and SaaS provide companies with the ability to make better real-time decisions and more effectively collaborate with partners. Below are just a few of the ways in which a data driven IT strategy enhances operational efficiency in many directions.

Data Driven IT Strategy for Production

The first way to make big data a central part of your day to day operations is to view it as central to your production schedule. The level of production is usually the easiest actionable change that a company can make in direct response to data. Recognizing consumer behavior by quantifying relevant social media information against production and consumer data can help to create a better reasoning behind the next production schedule.

Data driven IT strategy for Sales

IT departments in more successful companies are positioned strategically to partner directly with the operations of a business to drive revenue. For instance, spending for sales enablement tools have gone up almost 70 percent since 2014 because of the realization that the performance of individual sales contributors does not require a huge investment in order to substantially improve.

A data driven company has a much easier time aligning marketing goals with sales processes. The use of big data dashboards help the marketing team visualize trends that occur in the sales room, giving valuable insight that would otherwise go lost without true front line exposure. By breaking down the processes of the best sales representatives, marketers can invest in the sales enablement technologies that will allow other sales reps to mimic that performance.

Aligning Organizational Goals

Over 50% of executives in the B2B space have stated that they do not believe their employees fully understand company goals. This disconnect cannot be helped with a random implementation of big data that has nothing to do with the way that the company processes decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Deciding upon the metric to be applied to individual departments, from an improved customer experience to an improved end-of-quarter closing process, must be a decision that IT is fully involved in. Not only can new data measurement tools provide suggestions for the most productive metrics, but it can also pinpoint the employees who best embody the techniques to improve these metrics.

Continuous Training

The Harvard Business Review found that over 30 large companies had completely revamped the notion of an annual performance review for employees. All of these companies began to prefer an ongoing conversation with employees rather than basing their performance and compensation on a single metric should be measured at a specific time of the year. Currently, 70% of large companies are now completely reconsidering the way that they evaluate employees.

The need for an overlap between IT and HR becomes even more apparent when one considers that the companies who popularized the idea of performance curves and annual reviews – GE,

Cigna and Deloitte and Accenture – are now adhering to a much more data driven performance management strategy.

As IT sets the real-time metrics of a company based on a continuous influx of data, managers can relay that information to employees in an ongoing conversation that eases them into paradigm shifts without huge shifts in day to day habits. Companies are better able to follow the trends of their customer base as it moves rather than having to check in every six months and make a jarring change to internal policy because of changes in the business landscape.

Data Driven IT Strategy to Drive Morale

Companies that have replaced jarring policy changes and single metric ratings with real time moving goals that are backed by data drive morale in those companies, engaging employees into a better performance. Contrary to what many business executives believe, more data from IT actually allows management to treat employees in a more humane fashion rather than reducing them to a set of numbers.

Overall, companies that have implemented a data driven IT strategy have seen an improvement in employee performance, a higher willingness to collaborate between departments and more of a focus on company growth rather than maintaining individual performance.

As tools continue to improve for the IT department, businesses would do well to incorporate the real time metrics that IT now has access to into the larger framework of the company. If the leadership from Fortune 500 companies is any indication, the trend towards a production schedule, sales funnel and employee performance that is driven completely by real time data is the wave of the future in business.