You Need To Fall In Love With Data

This blog post is part of the Big Data Week Speaker interviews series. Vojta shares his thoughts about the importance of changing  mentalities when it comes to data-driven businesses, and about a new culture of decision making.

1. Why is it important for businesses in your industry to be more data driven nowadays?

In today’s increasingly complex and dynamic business world, you can’t afford to make decisions based solely on intuition. You need to understand what works and how it works. You need to fall in love with your business data and instill this love to everyone in the company.

2. What are the main challenges a company encounters when trying to leverage their data?

People’s mentalities. Around 70 % of the staff usually don’t embrace a data-driven mentality, even though they are convinced they do. They want to stick with the old believes and myths, and don’t want to challenge anything they believe “works just fine”.

3. How do you see the impact of big data in the retail field?

With the right tools it’s possible to track the impact of every business decision. That’s awesome and scary at the same time for almost all decision makers. A new culture is born, where there are no bad decisions, only bad hypothesis slowly emerge.

4. What do you foresee as being the growing big data challenge you will face in your role over the coming 3 years, and how are you preparing to face it?

Nowadays, I spend only 5% of my time on analyzing data. The rest of my time I’m a psychotherapist for decision makers. In the year of 2016, analysing business data and getting valuable insights out of it is not cutting edge anymore. But it’s becoming more and more difficult to find someone who will actually do something differently based on this output. People just don’t want to change. Anything. 5. Who do you think should attend your talk at Big Data Week? Why? Decision makers who are nowadays lost in reports and can’t quite get any information they ask for.