4 Secrets to Turn Data Into Actionable Insights
Discover four secrets to transforming data into actionable insights, from asking the right questions to using tools for business decisions.
While business data is abundant, turning that data into actionable information is the real challenge. This blog dives into four strategic approaches to ensuring your data informs, inspires, and directs meaningful business actions. From asking the right questions to ensuring you have the appropriate tools — we unpack the four secrets to converting raw data into decisive insights.
What Makes an Insight “Actionable”?
Before we reveal the secrets behind making data actionable, it’s essential to understand what really makes an insight “actionable.” Here’s a checklist to help answer the question.
- Is it an observation or an insight? An observation might note that sales peak on Fridays. An actionable insight digs deeper, uncovering that these peaks correlate with a weekly promotional campaign. An observation describes a trend, while an insight explains it.
- Is it actually actionable? Can you take this insight and act on it? An actionable insight should illuminate potential changes to processes, products, or services that can lead to measurable improvements. For instance, if the insight shows that customers buy more when offered free shipping, the action might be to implement or optimize a free shipping option to boost sales.
- Is it repeatable? A one-off anomaly doesn’t constitute an actionable insight. It needs to demonstrate a pattern or trend that can be leveraged repeatedly. Can the success of the Friday campaign be replicated with a similar approach on another day?
- Does it matter? The critical ‘so what’ factor involves assessing the strategic value of the insight. Does it significantly impact your business goals? For example, does the Friday sales example align with broader objectives such as increasing market share or improving customer satisfaction?
Insights are the catalysts for change. They equip you with the knowledge to make active, informed decisions that lead to significant business outcomes.
How to Turn Data Into Actionable Insights
With an understanding of what makes an insight actionable, you’re ready to learn the four secrets of turning mere data into actionable insights.
- Be Sure You’re Asking the Right Questions: Insights are only as powerful as the questions you ask. It’s crucial to align your queries with your strategic goals. Consider framing your questions to uncover deeper, actionable insights. For example, rather than simply identifying where your most profitable customers are located, ask, “Why are our most profitable customers concentrated in a specific region?” It’s about moving beyond the what to explore the why, setting the stage for insights that can directly influence business decisions and drive actionable outcomes.
- Be Sure You’re Collecting the Right Data: The next step is ensuring that you’re collecting data that can actually answer your questions. This is where relevance trumps quantity — you need the right information, not just more of it. For instance, if you’re trying to enhance product features, gather data that reflects how customers use and interact with your products. Look at online reviews, customer service logs, and direct feedback. It’s about handpicking and combining the data sources most likely to yield the insights you’re after, ensuring every piece of data has a purpose.
- Be Sure You Can Trust Your Data: Data integrity is non-negotiable. It involves ensuring that the information is accurate, consistent, and collected in a manner that complies with industry standards and legal regulations. To achieve this, you’ll need to integrate your data sources so you can access them all. Integration improves reliability and provides a more comprehensive view by knitting together disparate pieces of information from across your organization. Whether it’s sales data combined with marketing insights or customer feedback aligning with operational metrics, you create a richer, more accurate tapestry from which to draw your conclusions.
- Be Sure the Tools Are Easy to Use: Lastly, the tools you choose to analyze, interpret, and share your data should be intuitive, user-friendly, and accessible to team members with varying levels of technical expertise. An easy-to-use tool encourages widespread use, which can foster a culture of data-driven decision-making across your organization. Tools that balance sophistication with user accessibility allow more of your team to dive into the data, explore trends, and contribute insights. This democratization of data analysis is critical for swiftly turning insights into actions across all business levels.
Take Action — Bringing It All Together
Considering the enormous volume of data your business generates, turning that data into actionable insights is more easily accomplished using technology tools.
According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of organizations will deploy multiple data hubs as part of their data fabric architecture to enhance data and analytics sharing and governance. Data hubs are central points where important data is collected, shared, and managed — Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is one example of a data hub. Data fabric refers to an organization’s overall system and processes to handle and make sense of its data. Azure Data Lake and Microsoft Purview are examples of tools used to weave a data fabric. And then there’s Microsoft Fabric, a relatively new offering from Microsoft that combines several data storage and analytics tools into one integrated data platform.
Through these integrated data platforms, companies gain the agility to pivot quickly, informed by deep and broad insights. Turning complex data from multiple sources into comprehensible, actionable insights allows businesses to react to market dynamics and actively shape their strategies in real time.
How Velosio Can Help
Velosio works with small and midsized enterprises across industries to help guide these transformations, ensuring that every layer of your data fabric is optimized for performance, scalability, and future growth. As an award-winning Microsoft business partner, we’re here to help you select, implement, and optimize the technology tools that are right for your business. Ready for action? Reach out to start a conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What’s the difference between an actionable insight and an observation?
An actionable insight goes beyond just noting a trend or pattern. While an observation might say sales peak on Fridays, an actionable insight would say why, such as a weekly promotion. Insights explain the why behind the trends, provide context and direction for specific actions. Observations just describe the patterns without deeper implications or actions.
2. How do businesses make sure they’re collecting the right data to drive actionable insights?
Businesses should align their data collection with specific strategic questions and goals. Instead of collecting lots of data, focus on data that answers the questions being asked. For example if a company wants to improve product features, they should collect data from customer feedback, online reviews and customer service interactions to see how users are using their products. This way the data collected has a purpose, so it’s more likely to lead to actionable insights.
3. What role do user-friendly tools play in turning data into actionable insights?
User-friendly tools are key to democratizing data within a business. When tools are accessible and intuitive, employees across the business can get involved with data, explore trends and contribute valuable insights. This broad participation creates a culture of data driven decision making and insights can be translated into actions across the business quickly. Easy to use tools gets more people to analyze data, encourages a collaborative approach to turning insights into business strategy.