Insights

"Tangible and objective data supports individual expertise and ensures evidence-based decision making, so you can prove your alignment to strategy and encourage support for your operations."

While asset intensive organizations know they should be looking to analytics and data-driven insights to support decision-making, many are concerned they haven’t got enough data to get started, or that it’s not adequate to inform their strategy and optimizations. But to get to grips with it, you first need to understand how your data’s stored and shared across your organization.

Disconnected decision-making is the enemy of efficiency. And manually managed spreadsheets, owned by individual users and stored in unknown locations, are that enemy’s classic MO. If teams and departments aren’t equipped to share and communicate information, your organization’s operations will be undermined by misaligned views.

Effective asset management needs transparent, consistent data. Let’s take a deeper look at how to solve data silos across your organization.

United, up-to-date decision making

You know your boss’ big business ambitions, but how can you make operationalizing them less overwhelming? Relying on multiple spreadsheets to manage different assets is inefficient, insecure, and prone to human error. You can fix fragmentation and keep it current for everyone by moving to an asset management platform for easier data input and analysis across your portfolio — if you're wondering how to overcome data silos in your organization, watch our on-demand webinar, Dealing in Data, where we break things down to provide actionable best practice.

When your organization works together off the same shared insights, you make decisions that are consistent with your peers, and streamline upwards reporting to C-suite and shareholders alike. By supporting cross-departmental capabilities and organization-wide strategic thinking, you’ll be helping deliver corporate goals. You’ll impress the senior team, and maybe even earn that promotion.

Communication becomes more coordinated with unified data-capture and a single source of truth for your organization. It sounds complex, especially when you’re used to doing things a certain way, but it needn’t be difficult. To make the process even easier, look for tools with simple user interfaces, such as dashboards with drill-down capabilities.

For more active and agile decision-making, look for data visualization capabilities. Gen’s AppliedInsight suite has been designed around this need for clear, easy to read insights. That’s right — no more lost hours converting cells into pie charts! Quickly identify problematic areas and prioritize issues. This digestible view of a shared, comprehensive database enables you to do things like more easily coordinate recommendations for capital interventions with maintenance.

How can decision support tools make life easier?

Data-driven decision making is evidence-based decision making. And evidence-based decision making should give you confidence in the work you’re doing. Tangible and objective data supports individual expertise and ensures evidence-based decision making, so you can prove your alignment to strategy and encourage support for your operations.

Decision support tools make the whole process more efficient. They serve as a single window into organizational information. They also make it more secure. Rather than the looser security of multiple isolated sheets, singular, centralized platforms like AppliedInsight feature compartmentalization and high-level encryption, so you don’t need to worry about vulnerabilities.

So that’s efficiency, security, consistent decision-making, and easier outputs for reports, all taken care of. But are you worried your data isn’t sufficient? You’d be surprised what you can do with what you’ve already got. Gen’s SaaS-based data quality apps help you get started with the data you’ve got, by identifying and filling data gaps, cleansing data, and standardizing it across your organization.

From scattered silos to efficient operations

Decision-making can only be consistent if it’s data-driven. Decision support tools help formulate realistic targets, and track progress to achieving them.

With everyone on the same page, rather than several disparate sheets, everyone’s efforts are directed to shared success. Find out more about the steps to simplify your data collection and unify your operations in our long read: ‘Making change predictable’.