Understanding the real impact of data

Consultant and author Ritavan explains how businesses can benchmark their current data-driven impact

 

Being data-driven is no longer aspirational—it’s a necessity. The reason for this is that in today’s economy, to continue to grow your business and defend your profit margins, you need to craft a unique, differentiated offering for your customers in the data-driven paradigm, and compound it over long periods of time.

 

But here’s the challenge: most organisations have no clear way to benchmark their current data-driven impact. They’re buried in dashboards, KPIs, ML models and other data initiatives—but unclear whether these efforts are driving real business impact.

 

So how do you benchmark exactly where you stand?

 

The key is to ask the right set of questions. Below is a strategic framework—built around key questions—that helps you assess whether your organisation is creating value with data or just being a consumer of “AI technology”. Because remember—no one ever consumed themselves to glory.

 

Benchmarking your data-driven impact isn’t about ticking boxes or following groupthink “best practices” that were designed for someone else’s context and that result in copy-paste commoditised outcomes.

 

Data today is the new unit of value creation—but only if it’s being used for value creation, with deliberate leverage, alignment, simplification and optimisation to drive growth. Most businesses claim to be “data-driven,” but few can clearly articulate the impact their data strategies are actually delivering. Benchmarking your data-driven impact requires going beyond dashboards and KPIs. It requires a deep and honest interrogation of how your organisation uses data—not just to inform decisions, but to create value and drive outcomes.

 

To start, ask yourself this: Are you crowdsourcing your data strategy? If your roadmap is the product of disconnected, often conflicting departmental demands and consensus committees, it’s probably reactive, fragmented, and lacking strategic focus.

 

A coherent data strategy cannot emerge from a crowdsourced groupthink wish list. It must be rigorously designed around core data-driven value delivered to the customer, guided by clear business intent, and owned at the highest levels. That’s the first benchmark: Do you have a clearly articulated data strategy, and is it architected with clear intent to delight the customer?

 

From there, consider whether you’re simply following a spray and pray approach—collecting more data than you know what to do with, hoping some of it will yield insight. This kind of indiscriminate accumulation of “AI use cases” leads to noise, not clarity. Data should not be hoarded; it should be built into your core value creation mechanism. Every stream should have a clear “why” behind it: a decision it will inform, a behaviour it will explain, a value it will unlock. Benchmarking here means asking: How much of our data collection is tied directly to critical business outcomes for your customers?

 

The next trap is trying to boil the ocean. Many organisations fall into the pattern of trying to analyse everything, leading to superficial insights and analytical fatigue. True data-driven businesses prioritise. They identify the handful of leveraged data-driven opportunities that, if built out, would significantly move the needle—and focus relentlessly on those. Your benchmark: Can you name the two or three high-leverage data-driven opportunities with asymmetric returns that your business has right now?

 

You also need to understand the power laws in your data. In nearly every business, a small set of customers, products, or actions generate a disproportionate amount of value. Yet many teams treat all data equally, missing the opportunity to amplify what works best. Benchmarking means identifying those 10x-100x factors—and building systems to optimise around them. Are you prioritising the small percentage of key sources that drive most of your outcomes?

 

Beyond that, are you leveraging your unique legacy assets? Your legacy brand, supplier relationships, etc—they’re your unique legacy advantage. That leads naturally into your non-digital unfair advantages. Maybe it’s physical assets. Maybe it’s in-person customer experiences. Maybe it’s a physical footprint or a niche supply chain. These analogue advantages are powerful—if you can translate them into data-driven digital value. How are you using data to reinforce and extend what makes you uniquely hard to copy by counter positioning to your digital native competitors?

 

Next, ask whether you’ve productised the impact your data-driven solutions deliver. Truly data-driven businesses don’t just generate internal insights—they package them into products that deliver value to customers. Benchmark whether your data capabilities are externalised in ways that scale. Have you made your data the key differentiator and driver of value in your products or services?

 

Closely related is the idea of counter positioning—doing what your competitors can’t, or won’t, because it would break their current model. Have you built data capabilities that give you structural advantage—advantage that others can’t adopt without fundamentally changing who they are? Benchmark how distinct your approach is, and whether you’re leaning into what makes you unique based on the unfair advantages you have. That is hard to imitate.

 

Of course, this all has to tie back to the customer. Are you measuring the value you deliver to your customers—not just internally, but in terms your customer feels and would pay for?

 

Most companies track costs saved and conversions improved, but few track how much more value they have delivered to their customers. That’s your next benchmark: Can you quantify the real, data-driven value your customer receives?

 

Data strategies also fail when they’re siloed, with conflicting incentives and objectives. To align everyone in a company around data-driven value creation, Commander’s Intent offers a structured way to communicate purpose and direction. The Mission/Goal sets the high-level “why”, clarifying who is doing what, when, and for what broader purpose. This anchors all activity in shared meaning. The End-State then describes what success looks like, enabling teams to visualise the intended impact in measurable terms.

 

By tying this vision to metrics that matter, the quantifiable indicators of progress toward the End-State, leaders empower teams to make informed, autonomous decisions in line with the broader strategy. This alignment between intent and metrics fosters coherent action across the organisation, even as conditions change.

 

Another critical factor: have you abandoned blueprint-based, committee-consensus decision making? In high-velocity markets, rigid planning and slow governance kill adaptability and antifragility. Benchmark your decision-making: Are you running experiments based on real data, or are you still making calls based on gut, habit, or the loudest voice in the room? Are you busy using slow moving committees and bureaucratic decision making to pick the safest most politically convenient option, or are you picking the most intelligently contrarian one?

 

Next step back and ask: Are you radically rethinking your organisation and processes—or just layering tools on top of legacy systems? True data impact isn’t just additive; it’s subtractive and reimagined and reengineered from scratch. Benchmark the degree to which your operations have been rebuilt—not just digitised.

 

To manage this complexity, leading organisations modularise. They design processes and systems as flexible, swappable components that can scale and evolve. Are your workflows standardised and interoperable, or are they brittle and custom? That’s your next benchmark: How modular is your data-driven business?

 

Now zoom out. Do you understand the environment you’re operating in? Market dynamics, customer behaviours, competitor shifts—all are external signals operate in a larger environment that can be very varied. Benchmark your situational awareness using the Cynefin framework. How environment aware are you?

 

More technically, ask whether you have a mathematically optimisable, empirically valid model of your business. Can you simulate scenarios in rigorous experimentally measurable terms? Understand feedback loops and network effects? If not, you’re flying blind. This is a high benchmark, but it’s one that separates truly data-driven companies from the rest.

 

Then there’s mindset. Many organisations still operate from scarcity thinking—limited by budget, headcount, or existing customer demand. But data enables abundance: of new value for customers, new reach, of personalisation, of partnerships, of compounding value. Are you using data to unlock latent growth and discover unmet demand?

 

And finally, does your business operate with a data-driven funnel and flywheel? Funnels convert. Flywheels accelerate. The best companies don’t just acquire customers—they create feedback loops where data improves products and services by 10x+, which improves outcomes, which drives more usage and advocacy.

 

Benchmark your ability to compound value through every customer interaction to drive word of mouth.

 

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Ritavan is a highly regarded entrepreneurial technology leader, and author of Data Impact 

  

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Orientfootage