MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Leading With Decision-Driven Data Analytics

Data analysts often fail to produce insights for making effective business decisions, but that’s not their fault. Leaders need to make sure that data analytics is decision-driven.

If you were to ask any major CEO about good management practices today, data-driven decision-making would invariably come up. Companies have more data than ever, but many executives say their data analytics initiatives do not provide actionable insights and produce disappointing results overall.

In practice, making decisions with data often comes down to finding a purpose for the data at hand. Companies look for ways to extract value from available data, but that doesn’t necessarily mean data analysts are answering the right questions. It’s also not a safeguard against the influence of preexisting beliefs and incentives.

The solution is simple: Instead of finding a purpose for data, find data for a purpose. We call this approach decision-driven data analytics.

About the Author

Bart de Langhe is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at University Ramon Llull, ESADE. Stefano Puntoni is a professor of marketing at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University and the director of the Psychology of AI lab at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics.

Learn more about MIT SMR.