Data Utilization: Facts, Stats & IO Research

Much was said about data-driven culture and its benefits, effective data delivery and the use of data for improving businesses. At the same time, very few people talk about data utilization. Let’s start with some facts that were revealed by the IO during the System Capital Management PR meeting, on June 7, 2018.

People’s attention is drawn to results, and not everyone explores data deeper than its surface. The fact is that there is a large amount of data around us, which can be incorrect, biased and warped. But the fact remains that, the data world is growing constantly and exponentially. Here are some facts to prove that:

• The amount of data that was produced by people 100 years ago can be generated by modern people in one week.
• Humanity generates 2.5 Exabytes of data per day that equals 1 billion films that could be downloaded from the Internet. There are nearly 333.000 films on Earth.
• Last year, people generated the highest amount of data that have ever happened in the entire history of humanity.
• Data usage has rapidly increased. If we collect all the data produced on this planet last year, and burn on CD disks, and pack these discs in a column, it would cover a height which will be as high the distance from the earth to the moon, which is about 384.400 km.

Possible Global Problems With Data:

1. Entropy.It’s when exabytes of data are generated on daily basis, but of which, people need just part of it. Even when a random business gathers data for decision-making, they will hardly need more than 10% of the data gathered. Due to this fact, big data processing technology is vital.
2. Biases.The general data can be biased, and we often have to stay focused and to explore it deeper to find out the truth. Here is a short example of what data biases are: Nearly everyone knows that there was a demographic boost in the human population in the last 100 years. 2 billion in the 1900s grown to 7.4 billion in 2017.Here is the graph:

1. It shows that the whole Earth faces demographic growth. But it’s not fair for all countries.In fact, the population of Europe, North America and Oceania have not changed for the last 300 years.

1. Tools.Most of them are still stuck in the 90s, they are complex and not all the employees need all this data. This is what makes the data utilization rate less than 10-15% in most companies.

• Use concentrated data that can be your competitive advantage;
• Check it for validity;
• Receive the accurate and necessary data via reliable channels.

Data Utilization for Publishers: Research

As long as we work mainly with newsrooms, it’s time to discuss the benefits of building data-driven teams within digital newspapers and magazines.

Discussing the latest trends of Media industry during Newscamp on April 18-19, 2018, in which IO Technologies participated, lead us to this part. The IO team wanted to share the key findings from their research on data usage, and the insights they got from the conference speakers.

As it is stated in the NVP Research 2017, almost 37% of digital media businesses invested around $100 million for the last five years. 6% of publishers invested more than $1 billion into the data sphere. According to NVP, the whole data industry costs more than $122 billion.

Companies adopt and develop data-driven culture due to the fact that editorial teams utilizing data, grow faster than regular ones. As the Forrester states in their research, they differ by 10 times in the Media industry. 80% of executives assume their investments in data, successful.

For media, a data-driven approach can bring insights leading to efficiency and boosting revenues. For instance, having a dashboard with several metrics gives journalists and editors understanding of:

• Which articles drive the highest conversion rates -> what to promote.
• Which sources drive the highest conversion rates -> where to promote.
• What topics are most engaging for paid customers -> what to write about.
• Which author brings the highest number subscribers -> who should write it.

As a result: companies get an increase in the number of subscribers, improve user engagement, get less churn, and more revenue.

IO Research

We have found that data-driven projects are 2.5 times less likely to fail. Among editorial teams whose utilization rate of data provided by us is more than 80%, only 13% showed traffic decrease, while 33% of teams with data utilization rate below 30% that use data occasionally reported a decrease in traffic. If we compare two companies with 20 active data users, the team that has KPIs, cultivates data culture, and has regular data meetings will grow 1.7x faster than the team with the same number of active users, but no data usage and culture.

For achieving the goal of making a whole team be onboard, gamification can be used. For instance, while using IO Analytics, each journalist has their own dashboard with data analytics and can track their progress and compare it with others. They receive points for a certain achievement or set of achievements defined by their management as well as for using data. At the end of a month or quarter, the top 3 authors receive small gifts. This keeps the team motivated and awaken its interest in data analytics. According to our internal research, editorial teams with KPIs for authors show data utilization rate twice higher than teams with no KPIs.

Main takeaways

The bottom line of our research is that it’s crucial that data be utilized.

• There is no sense in collecting big data that no one will use. Data has to answer business questions and be focused on business goals, it has be a competitive advantage.
• Companies should improve not data but the technology of working with it. It simplifies data delivery and skyrockets the data utilization rate.
• It’s always better to boost the productivity of 100 employees by 5% than of one employee by 50%, the whole teams should be data-driven to become effective.
• Data should be delivered to different teams in the format, on time and via a channel that would be the most convenient for them, which will ensure an organic fit of data into the company’s everyday workflows.

It increases teams’ chances for success, their growth, overall company’s revenues. That is the reason for the data-driven culture to be absolutely worth investing.