Wanna know a secret? very few companies are actually data-driven #unpopularopinion
I’ll caveat that though. They’ve got the dashboards. They name-drop the metrics in board meetings. There’s probably a Power BI or Sisense licence sitting in your inbox right now that someone bought because “we need to be more data-driven.”
But when it’s time to actually make a decision, especially the chunky, strategic, you-bet-your-budget-on-it kind of decision, the process looks pretty much the same as it has for the past fifty years.
Gut. Opinion. Whoever shouts loudest in the room.
That’s not data-driven. That’s data-justified.
The difference matters
Data-justified is when you’ve done the project. Built the warehouse. Got the analytics in place. Maybe even tweaked a couple of things based on a pattern someone spotted in last quarter’s report.
You can stand up at a conference and tell everyone you’ve “embarked on a data journey.” You’ve ticked the box.
But the big stuff, the stuff that actually moves the business, that’s still rooted in SLT and shareholder feelings and opinions. Shhhh 🤫
I’m not saying that to just be contrarian (although I’m good at that, I’m informed). It’s human. Strategic decisions are uncomfortable, and a confident voice in a boardroom feels like a safer thing to bet on than a chart someone produced last Wednesday.
The problem is, you can’t really tell yourself you’re data-driven if the data only shows up after the decision has already been made.
How “data-justified” actually shows up
You’ll recognise it if you’ve lived it.
The roadmap gets set in a strategy offsite. Someone then asks the analytics team to “pull together the numbers to support it.” Two weeks later, a deck arrives. The numbers, funnily enough, support it.
A new contract type gets greenlit because the MD has a hunch. Operations are told to make it work. Six months later, the data shows the margin is half what was promised, but by then the conversation has moved on.
A marketing channel gets cut because last quarter felt slow. Nobody checks whether the pipeline actually came from there. It just felt slow.
None of this is malicious. It’s just what happens when the foundations aren’t there to make data the obvious starting point, rather than the polite afterthought.
The path past it
Becoming actually data-driven isn’t a software purchase. It’s a foundations problem.
You need data that people trust. You need it in a place they can get to/where they already are. And you need it answering the questions the business is actually asking, not the ones the dashboard happened to be built around two years ago.
That’s it. Not glamorous. Not Gartner-sexy. But until you’ve got that, no amount of AI, automation or “embedded analytics” is going to change how decisions actually get made.
When the foundations are right, something interesting happens. The default flips. Decisions don’t move forward without the data to back them. Not because there’s a policy. Because the data is there, it’s trusted, and ignoring it would feel daft.
That’s the bit nobody sold you on your last generic dashboard demo.
So, which one are you?
If you’re sat reading this thinking “yeah, that’s us,” you’re in good company. Most FM businesses I sit with are honest about it once we get past the LinkedIn version of their data story.
The fix isn’t another platform. It’s getting properly clear on three things. What decisions do you need to make to align with strategy? What data would you need to make them well? And can your current setup actually deliver that?
Start there. The rest follows.
If you want a hand pulling that thread, that’s the conversation we have most weeks. Drop me a message.
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