Data surrounds us, competing for space on our drives and in our lives. Worldwide, nearly 402.74 million terabytes of data are created every single day.
Yet despite all the data available, businesses still feel they are making decisions in the dark. Stakeholders look at a sea of numbers and see only chaos. Teams wade through conflicting information and find only noise. Executives sit through carefully crafted slide shows and feel only frustration. What they need are answers. All they see are more questions.
It doesn't have to be that way. Achieving cost transparency and clarity across the enterprise is possible. To get there, we need to first dive deeper into the obstacles blocking our view.
Organizations spend millions on strategies to propel businesses forward, and millions more on teams to deliver on that strategy. But there's a chasm between day-to-day execution and strategy that can feel impossible to bridge.
To close that gap, businesses must find ways to weave near-real-time data through every process, tool, and business decision. Yet KPMG found that only 12% of companies have an approach to data taxonomy and analytics that is embedded throughout the enterprise, and only 21% say it's a fundamental part of the business strategy.
In the absence of data they can trust, organizations end up making gut-level guesses instead of data-driven decisions about which projects to prioritize and where to add capacity.
Today's businesses are spoiled for choice when it comes to technology. Whether they need help tracking their work, communicating with one another, or understanding their customers, they have multiple tools that can serve their needs.
Too often, this leads to tool sprawl–too many tools on too many platforms–making it difficult to move data from one to another. Plus, even inside the same tool suite, subtle changes in setup and execution from one business unit to the next impact data taxonomy.
As a result, organizations spend countless hours manipulating data into spreadsheets and slide decks that are stale by the time they're even completed, leaving teams and executives hesitant and unsure about the insights. Maybe that's why a mere 6% of organizations report that they can locate meaningful insights throughout the enterprise.
Perhaps most dangerous of all is when a team believes they have all the data they need and moves ahead with a decision, only to find out too late they were missing the right context.
Accurate insights rely on both qualitative and quantitative data, yet reconciling qualitative and quantitative data can be difficult. One reason might be that teams often hesitate to share bad news as quickly as they share good news.
Fearing they lack a complete picture, organizations tend to overcompensate by scheduling countless hours of meetings. These hours add up fast! One company discovered they had spent 300,000 hours in weekly meetings in a single year.
The end result is that businesses are stuck, circling endlessly, unable to garner enough trust and alignment to make a confident decision.
To Step Forward with Confidence, Businesses Need End-to-End Enterprise Visibility.
Start by connecting execution to strategy with technology and tools including Jira Align, Atlas, OKRs for Jira, Advanced Planning, Structure, and Big Picture. Leadership and teams will gain clear insights into how to adjust funding, prioritize projects, and allocate resources to drive business forward.
Once you have a clear connection in place, you can consolidate optimized data from disparate tools into a single-pane-of-glass dashboard, with connectors like AlphaServe, datasets like Enterprise Insights, and data visualization tools like Power BI, Tableau, and Atlassian Analytics.
Once data is connected and consolidated, don't forget to collaborate. Data is only numbers on a page without human guardrails to help provide understanding, insights, and context. Data-prompted conversations give you the full picture, so you can gain alignment and make decisions with authority.
According to a survey by McKinsey, enhanced visibility between teams and leadership is proven to improve operational effectiveness by 30-50%.
Jumpstart your strategy and build a measurable path forward. Learn the anatomy of an OKR, how to craft one, and how Jira Align helps track OKRs to enable data-driven decisions throughout your planning cycle.
Watch On-Demand: prcp.io/okr-in-45
Bring your knowledge of agile, an understanding of value streams, and background on your organization's setup. Walk away with tactics for linking team efforts to strategy, funding, and each other.
Save Your Seat: prcp.io/wrkshp
Together with the experts at Atlassian, we explore how Jira Align as a platform, when implemented well, can provide real-time visibility and improve coordination so that organizations can adapt more quickly to market changes.
Download: prcp.io/connected-enterprise
Your employees are how your company innovates and thrives. So, why do we care about happy employees? Highly engaged teams outperform the rest when it comes to business outcomes that are critical to the success of your organization.
Read More: prcp.io/price-of-engagement
The 2023 KPMG US Technology Survey Report found that companies have reaped the benefits of leveraging Cloud and XaaS technologies, with better data management integration being the benefit they cite most often, at 45%.
Yet, most respondents are still stuck in the migration phase rather than having the freedom to move on to optimizing cloud environments. And 51% still hope to connect data sources to enable advanced analytics and real-time visibility.
That sentiment is completely understandable. Consolidating and optimizing the data from many different cloud-based tools into one view is essential for making decisions with real-time, accurate data. Technology exists to help with this effort, including Alphaserve connectors, datamarts like Enterprise Insights, and data visualization tools like PowerBI, Tableau, and Atlassian Analytics.
The surge in AI technologies like ChatGPT has urged businesses to leverage it for efficiency and agility. However, to harness AI's full potential, companies must overcome data fragmentation and manual processes.
Read More: prcp.io/ready-for-aiA recent KPMG survey found that lack of coordination and governance among technology functions is the #1 hurdle for transformation progress. Coaching and training for more effective program interval planning and portfolio syncs are vital for full visibility into dependencies and risks.
Coaching and training is a critical piece for teams that are new to OKRs as well. People need help learning how to think about their work in terms of data, without going down a rabbit hole of too many interconnected initiatives or key results that are too hard to measure. Tying initiatives to objectives and determining how best to understand the impact of that work is a new skill for many people and one that will take some experimentation to get right.
Even if your budget doesn't stretch to full-fledged coaching, it's essential to remember the importance of conversations around what you see on your data dashboards.
The power of the right conversation in the right place.
An example of the danger of trusting data in a vacuum came straight from Praecipio's marketing function. Last year, we sponsored several conferences and tracked our return on investment for each.
One of those conferences was brand new, and we were fairly certain it wasn't a good fit. The location was remote, the effort to attend was high, and the audience was on the edge of our target. But we wanted to try it and see.
Imagine our surprise to discover that we could directly tie a $300K deal to that conference!
If we'd stopped at the data, we would have invested in a sponsorship for the following year. Luckily, we did not.
Instead, we talked to members of the on-site team and discovered that our original assumptions were proven correct.
The audience wasn't the right one, and booth traffic was minimal. And the $300K contract? It came not from the attendees but from one of our fellow sponsors.
Enterprise visibility is crucial for organizations aiming to break free from the overwhelming data overload and make informed, strategic decisions. By connecting, consolidating, and collaborating around your data, you can ensure that your business decisions are based on accurate, real-time insights. We've compiled answers to some of the most common questions regarding enterprise visibility and how to implement it effectively.
Achieving end-to-end enterprise visibility involves several key steps:
The main challenges include:
Real-time data provides up-to-the-minute insights that are crucial for making timely decisions. When organizations have access to real-time data and cost transparency, they can:
Yes, AI tools can significantly enhance enterprise visibility by automating data collection, analysis, and reporting. AI-powered platforms can:
Data taxonomy is critical for successfully implementing AI tools for enterprise visibility. Without organized data, AI models cannot operate at their full potential.
To avoid the pitfalls of misleading data, organizations should:
