When a brown bear catches a salmon, it doesn’t simply devour it; it picks it apart for the most nutritious cuts. Just like a bear, as a business owner you can’t stop at the data-gathering stage. To feed your company with meaningful data, you must refine and process it to extract the meatiest bits. In short, you need to turn data collection into data action.

Business leaders no longer struggle with data collection and storage. Virtually anyone can access cloud software and collection methods without breaking the bank. The real challenge lies in tying raw information to your infrastructure.

But according to a study by Accenture and General Electric, 89 percent of executives see big data analytics as the make-or-break point for startups, yet few take action based on data. By failing to incorporate a data analytics strategy, you risk losing market share and momentum.

As an entrepreneur, the odds are undeniably against you. When one small misstep could spell disaster for your startup, you can’t afford to ignore data infrastructure. Data-driven decision-making is informed, confident, and factual and allows you to make decisions using your head, not just your instincts.

“More accurate analyses may lead to more confident decision making. And better decisions can mean greater operational efficiencies, cost reductions and reduced risk.” (Source: SAS)

To stand a fighting chance at survival, you must learn from data and take action quickly and sensibly. Here’s how to turn your data into actionable steps:

• Inventory Internal Data

  The first step is recognizing all your data sources internally and ensuring you have access to both structured and unstructured data. You might already be collecting useful data as a byproduct of another process, such as the volume of downloads you receive at particular times of the day.

  By connecting metrics to your wild internal data, you’ll start to glean trends and warning signs that will point you to the right action steps. For example, trends could show signs that an employee isn’t hitting the mark or should be rewarded for her outstanding performance.

• Approach Data as a Driver of Innovation

  To start turning your data collection into action, think of your data in terms of innovation opportunities. Look at consumer behavior trends alongside your product list, and it should become clear when something is amiss.

  For example, you might need to discontinue a product if you notice a lack of interest or it’s inconsistent with your target demographic. Using that information, you can quickly start improving your services and product offering and be confident you’re making well-informed decisions.

  http://yfsmagazine.com/2015/04/25/refuel-your-small-business-with-actionable-data/

Tech jobs are undoubtedly on the rise. Code.org predicts that by 2020, computing jobs will have more than doubled to 1.4 million. Not only that, but a recent survey by the Technology Councils of North America revealed that 74 percent of tech executives think there’s already a shortage of qualified workers. In other words, capable tech employees are in high demand.

So why are so many women leaving the tech industry? Women were greatly outnumbered in the tech field to begin with. Even major companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple reported that men outnumbered women (at least) 4 to 1 in tech departments. Now, even more women are leaving their highly profitable jobs for preventable, fixable reasons.

Some reported feeling like their work environments were “hostile,” male-centered and isolating. Others felt like they were discriminated against due to preconceived notions regarding their gender, age and lifestyle choices — especially about marriage and motherhood. Discrimination often led to them being overlooked for special projects and promotions.

Motherhood and rigid job structures were other major complaints. In one survey, more than 10 percent of respondents cited poor maternity leave policies as a major factor for leaving their jobs. Others said their work environment didn’t support their parenting responsibilities and that their salaries couldn’t cover child care costs.

In a time of remarkable growth, managers in tech simply can’t afford to keep losing — or not hiring — female employees. They must take steps to make their work environments more welcoming and unbiased toward women or risk not having the talent to get the job done.

Employers need to make women in tech feel supported from day one. But to achieve this, they have to consciously create a culture that embraces and supports women at every stage of their professional and personal lives.

Here’s how.

1. Encourage diversity.

A successful business thrives on diversity: different voices and different skill sets working together harmoniously. Women add a crucial element of diversity to the workforce that shouldn’t be disregarded. Employers are responsible for ensuring their company culture never muffles diverse voices or ideas.

2. Reward employees based on fair, transparent performance goals.

Eliminate questions of bias or unfair treatment by having clearly outlined and accessible performance metrics. Employees should know what it takes to be rewarded or advance in their careers. The same rules and standards need to apply to every employee; female workers shouldn’t feel like they have to be aggressive or work extra hard to earn recognition. Incorporating a real-time performance dashboard into company operating systems is a great way to create transparency around personal and company-wide performance.

3. Invite feedback.

Part of keeping employees happy is listening and responding to feedback. Create an environment where employees feel safe voicing concerns, and respect what they have to say. If they feel heard, they’ll be more loyal.

4. Create a truly flexible work environment.

Employers making women and men with families feel respected and supported is vital. Making their workdays too rigid can inadvertently force them out of the company. Instead, allow employees to set their workdays around their parental responsibilities — as long as they’re still producing results.

5. Create a female-friendly workplace.

Hiring one woman and expecting her to fit in and solve a company’s diversity problems is simply not enough. Employers need to make the work environment safe and comfortable for women by eliminating preconceived notions, forbidding sexist language and behavior, hiring multiple women at once and establishing a clear sexual harassment policy.

As the tech field continues to grow, filling all the vacancies will be difficult. Managers will need to not only snatch up every qualified candidate they can find — regardless of gender, age or race — but also hold onto the workers they currently have. To stop the droves of female employees leaving tech jobs, leaders need to focus on making the industry more fair, flexible and female friendly.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243943

Labeling any data as “bad” feels a little bit like betrayal to the true data fanatic, but you know when the data you’re collecting is a little…well, under the weather. Website traffic suddenly drops to zero, you’re missing data when you run your reports and names appear in five different formats. By that same token, you know what healthy data looks like. It’s clear, easy to understand and ties into your overarching strategy.

Still, it can be hard to discern whether your data is truly in tip-top shape, and unless it is, the information you glean from it isn’t going to propel your startup forward. It’s important to regularly assess your data infrastructure for quality and effectiveness to fuel your business in the most efficient way possible.

The first step is creating a rubric so you can treat your data to a regular checkup. Here’s how to get started:

1. Establish a metrics hierarchy.

Look at your overarching business goals, and prioritize your metrics accordingly. To ensure your goals are balanced, focus on the five pillars of success: strategy, methodology, technology, implementation and adoption. Then, prioritize goals for each of the pillars so your rubric can gauge the well-being of every layer of your operation.

2. Share the responsibility.

When you know which metrics are important, hold yourself and your team accountable. Monitor your highest priorities yourself, setting a schedule for regular checkups. Plug it into your calendar so you don’t forget.

Delegate other metrics, making sure everyone knows when and how they should be performing checkups and to whom they are reporting. Employees should be able to look at the metrics they’re responsible for and detect any shifts in purpose or outliers that could be attributed to errors.

3. Create a rubric document.

Craft a living, breathing document that will act as your data standards guide. It should outline answers to questions such as “Does the data we’re collecting tie into the overall strategy goals?” and “Does everybody understand best practices for naming and inputting data?”

Establish a checklist so the manager of that metric can cross-check that the data is living up to your standards at regular intervals.

4. Make it easy.

Your rubric should be accessible with the click of a button. It should be present on your team members’ dashboards in a digestible, intuitive format so your team can navigate it with ease. In data, there is such a thing as too many choices, so don’t create 20 reports if you only need five. There’s no point in empowering everybody to take control of data health when the checklist itself is unhealthy.

5. Check early and often.

Create your rubric as soon as you can. Establishing a data-driven culture is important as you grow, and it’s far easier to achieve this culture while your company is still young and mobile.

Your rubric should be like any other teammate. It should be involved in every decision you make and every meeting you attend. Embed the rubric into your processes, and schedule regular group checkups so you can collectively track your team members’ data health and address any issues they might be facing.

6. Don’t be afraid to change.

The whole point of establishing metrics in the first place is to help you achieve your overall business goals. If the data you’re tracking turns out to be unrelated to your goals, shift your focus and reassess your hierarchy of metrics.

Your company is in constant flux. Your definition of a “healthy company,” your priorities, your goals and the world around you will all change whether you like it or not. So your analytics system needs to grow with you.

Integrating analytics into your company culture will reveal whether you have an ineffective data infrastructure. Backed by good data, you can keep striving toward those beautiful business goals with the knowledge that you’ll cross the finish line in great health.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243126

Remember when phones were only used for making calls? Today, they’re used to transfer money, write emails, play movies, take pictures, make purchases, video chat, and more. In fact, calls only account for a small fraction of phone use. In the past 20 years, the shift in technology has caused a lot of companies and jobs to go extinct, but a select few — those that anticipated and welcomed change — survived.

Now healthcare is undergoing a similar shift. Data and technology advancements are revolutionizing the healthcare landscape, from patient exams to medical records to staffing and scheduling. On top of that, healthcare is primed to become a trillion-dollar industry within the next five years. But one complication remains: Hospital executives are notoriously reluctant to embrace change, and this reluctance is slowing advancements throughout their facilities and the industry as a whole.

So with an inevitable wave of change coming to healthcare, you must decide whether you’re going to hold your hospital back or embrace these innovations and be on the forefront of the healthcare revolution.

The Unfortunate Trend of Ignoring Innovation

For quite some time, healthcare execs have been so focused on getting reimbursed for services, cutting spending, and growing profits that they’ve become unwilling to invest in new data infrastructures or technologies. Even if tools offer significant benefits to patients, professionals, and the organization, they’re often written off as extraneous expenses. This reluctance to move beyond the flawed fee-for-service business model has stalled innovation and promoted inefficiency throughout the industry.

For example, electronic health records are considered basic but beneficial technology and data advancements, yet only 44 percent of hospitals and 40 percent of physicians have adopted a rudimentary EHR system. And of the $2.6 trillion Americans spend on healthcare each year, about $750 billion of it is wasted on unnecessary and inefficient practices and technologies.

Being behind the IT curve is one thing, but putting those lags into perspective is another story. The Institute of Medicine created some specific analogies to drive home just how far healthcare management is falling behind other industries. For example:

• Automated banking transactions would take days, not seconds, if banks grappled with the same number of missing files that hospitals do.
• Different blueprints would be delivered to the construction team, electricians, and plumbers at work sites — with little collaboration among them — if construction were like healthcare.
• Prices would be difficult to locate or make sense of in grocery stores, varying widely within the same location, if supermarkets operated like the healthcare industry.

At this point, healthcare in the U.S. has reached a crossroads, where the reluctance to progress is not only hurting an industry, but also an entire population.

As a healthcare exec, you must stop viewing these technologies and data infrastructures as superfluous accessories. It’s time to start identifying them as valuable tools that will revolutionize a struggling industry by improving the quality of care, preventing diseases instead of just treating them, cutting costs without sacrificing jobs or care, and offering insights that might have otherwise been overlooked.

In the coming years, if you don’t get on board with change, you (and your organization) will inevitably be left behind. But luckily, it’s not only possible for you to catch up in the tech and data game — you can also lead and propel the industry. 

Make Time for Tech

To get the healthcare industry back on track, every healthcare professional needs to become more technical. But it’s particularly important for you to make time for tech education so you can lead the rest of your team through the transition. Here are some tips for fitting tech education into any busy schedule:

1.     Get your feet wet. There’s no doubt that your schedule is jam-packed, but you’ve got to make education a priority. Start by trying to work in 30 minutes of education every week. That might mean taking online courses during your lunch break, listening to podcasts during your commute, or watching a video while you’re at the gym. You need to work tech into your schedule.

2.     Utilize online learning tools. There are so many online learning tools available for these technical areas — some are even free. Popular examples include Codecademy (which teaches you to code through free interactive instruction) and Coursera (an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations to offer free online courses). You can even use YouTube or Google — they’re great places to start when you want to increase your technical knowledge.

3.     Test-drive tech software. Many software tools, such as Tableau, offer free trials that allow you to discover what they have to offer before you invest. You can get ahead of the curve by playing around with their interfaces and becoming familiar with their capabilities, even if you don’t plan on using the software full-time.

4.     Brush up on healthcare tech trends. You need to make sure you’re well-versed in the “next big thing” in healthcare. Right now, that includes predictive medicine through wearable technology, data interfaces, and robot doctors, à la IBM’s “Watson.”

5.     Take a class. If you live near a university or know of a school with online options, consider taking a course in data or business analytics. It may be a heftier investment than the other options, but it’s definitely one that can pay dividends in the future.

6.     Become an advocate. As an organizational leader, it’s up to you to become a catalyst for change. If your hospital is going to be on the forefront of your industry, you have to advocate for education and advancement. Talk to your board and peers about the importance of investing time (and money) in organization-wide education, and suggest tools or resources for advancing change throughout the hospital.

Whether you like it or not, change happens — just ask any telephone company executive from 1995. And as the world advances toward more tech-driven, data-centric healthcare models, you need to prepare yourself and your hospital by investing more time, energy, and resources into tech and data education. Only those who embrace change, adopt technology, and develop a passion for making their hospital the best will be around in 20 years to tell the tale.

www.healthworkscollective.com/how-hospital-execs-can-keep-fast-paced-tech-world/

https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/growth-strategies/2015/02/implement-an-effective-business-value-dashboard.html

You know that a top company is made of top people. And if your people aren’t happy, they’ll move right along to the next opportunity. According to a recent survey by Right Management, 86 percent of employees surveyed planned to find new jobs this year.

So when it comes to making your employees happy, you need more than just incentives. It’s not enough to decide that the carrot is a far better motivator than the stick. You must present your extraordinary people with extraordinary carrots.

Taking the time to align your incentives with numerical targets could pay dividends not only for your long-term business goals but also for each precious career that you shape.

I believe that employees who work toward specific numbers — figures meaningfully connected to overarching business goals — are much more likely to feel in control of their performance and motivated to impress.

Here are five steps you can take to match rewards with results:

1. Keep targets visible.

Performance metrics should be in front of your employees at all times. Whether this takes the form of desktop dashboards or a collective one hung up in the office, targets should be one of the first things your employees see when they sit down to work. This way, they’ll always be goal-oriented.

2. Clarify incentives and intervals.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to be sure your team understands the incentive system. Be sure that your incentives and tangible rewards are clear.

Avoid rewarding in arbitrary increments or just whenever you remember. Rather, match your incentives with a rhythm that makes sense and supply the reward as soon as your employees achieve their targets.

3. Create a tie-in with larger goals.

Incentives are much more effective when they’re meaningful. Be sure employees know why they’re working toward their particular performance targets so they can connect their rewards to the success of your company.

Although you want to connect rewards with target numbers, reminding a team of the holistic and qualitative side of the goals is just as important.

4. Set individual incentives.

One of the major ways that an incentive program can fall flat is by neglecting to treat employees as individuals. Not all your employees will be motivated by money, so  learn personal details about them to gauge the incentives they’ll value most.

For example, if an employee has a special family event, you can reward her by giving her extra time off to prepare.

5. Meet regularly and celebrate.

Having regular meetings is a great way to check in with employees, ensure that they feel supported, ask questions about their targets and catch up over coffee and doughnuts.

My company, Future Technologies, holds status-review meetings on Fridays where staffers discuss goals for the upcoming week. These meetings also serve to recognize employees who have hit or surpassed their goals.

To give your employees a sense of pride, let them know when their hard work is appreciated. This will motivate other team members with a healthy sense of competition.

Zappos is one company that understands the power of aligning employee incentives. It’s known for strong customer service, which the company accomplishes through a 100-point scale called the Happiness Experience Form.

Each agent-to-customer interaction is scored based on various questions about the quality of service. The goal is for agents to make customers feel valued. And if agents collect enough points, Zappos rewards them with incentives.

By providing employees incentives according to performance targets and adapting that system to take each individual into account, you can build a motivated, united team. After all, your company is only as strong as its individuals.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241909

When you hear the word “innovation,” you probably don’t think of numbers. Instead, you might think of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPod, the funky beanbags in Google’s unique office space or a building made of glass that defies the laws of gravity. The amazing world of innovation, it seems, is made of images, not numbers.

But as businesses continue to evolve at high speeds, your company needs to be in a state of constant innovation to keep up. While thinking intuitively about innovation might lead to some good ideas eventually, innovation takes time and money. You need to invest wisely and any smart investment is backed by metrics.

With metrics, you can isolate the very products and offerings your customers crave. You can then adapt your business to suit them. And it’s not just about creating the next new thing; it’s about creating something that customers want. And although measuring innovation isn’t exactly cut-and-dried, some metrics can point you in the right direction.

Here are some ways to tap metrics to help you turn your ideas into truly game-changing innovations:

People tend to doubt that a data-driven approach to innovation will work — mostly because they assume a direct performance metric is required to measure success. But the truth is that if you’re innovating well, your performance will improve across the board, from revenue to employee performance and customer satisfaction.

True innovation can happen when you use metrics to spot market gaps and fill them with need-based solutions. Take Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis’ innovation strategy, for example.

Before it invests in a health care innovation, it examines what patients need. The company takes its strategy a step further by uncovering multiple uses for a new discovery. For instance, it uses parallel testing to see if it’s possible to treat a range of cancers with just one drug. Recently, the company received approval for Afinitor to be used to treat advanced breast cancer as well as other types of cancers.

Once you develop your innovative solution, use performance metrics to measure how well it fulfills your customers’ wants and needs. Use quantitative customer surveys, gauge demand across product lines and validate new ideas with your audience.

This will enable you to determine how your return on investment is affected by your top innovations.

Coca-Cola, for example, launched a “venturing and emerging brands” team in 2007 to locate the company’s next billion-dollar brand. The group stays abreast of trends to enable Coca-Cola to take advantage of the niche markets that it has historically struggled with — among them, teas and energy drinks. In 2008, Coca-Cola bought a stake in Honest Tea on the team’s recommendation and eventually purchased more of the company. Coca-Cola’s moves have been validated: Honest Tea’s sales of $38 million in 2008 became $100 million by last year.

Create a system by which employees are encouraged to come up with ideas and turn your whole company into an innovation machine. Keep in mind that innovation takes time and effort, so make sure your employees are compensated for their work.

Connect incentives to ingenuity, and your employees will likely come up with more great ideas. Just look at Unilever: It created an initiative to drive innovation by encouraging employees to purchase products at a heavily discounted rate and offer feedback.

As a result, its employees essentially became in-house beta testers.

Of course, innovation can be fun. But by incorporating metrics into your innovation strategy, you give your company a leg up.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241683