Data Culture – The top 3 challenges of digital projects and why people themselves are the best solution
The authors in this article delve into the three reasons for the failure of digitization projects and how companies can significantly increase their chances of success by creating a pervasive data culture and establishing a single role.
Two worlds meet each other
For six months, Mrs. Schuster and her data science team have been working on the new churn prediction model. This new algorithm is designed to help Classic Sales GmbH predict the likelihood of a customer churn, i.e. the migration of a customer to another company, and automatically inform the sales staff when a critical value is exceeded. Furthermore, her team has created a dashboard over the last few months on which every sales employee can precisely track the most important influencing variables and reasons for a possible churn. This data-driven predictive model would be a real support for the sales team at Classic Sales GmbH, as they would be able to identify which customers need special attention and what needs to be offered to retain them. In addition to increasing the retention rate, this also leads to a reduction in revenue loss. The management is thrilled because the company can demonstrate that they are also “data-driven”. However, the sales team categorically rejects the introduction of the new system, and this initiative fails completely.
Companies in the dichotomy of digitisation
In fact, over 80% of all digitisation projects fail. This number is even higher when it comes to projects that use artificial intelligence or data science. Here, even up to 87 % of all implemented projects fail.
These figures are alarming and show that many companies, similar to the fictitious Classic Sales GmbH, are far from being considered “data driven”. Furthermore, the trend of companies moving towards a data-driven culture seems to be stagnating or declining. This is shown by figures from the Big Data and AI Executive Survey 2021. According to the survey, only 31% of all companies surveyed considered themselves to be “data driven”, and after a brief boom in the Corona year 2020, a downward trend can be seen over the last four years. In 2017, the survey value was still 37.1 %. These developments only seem paradoxical
when one considers that 99% of the companies surveyed state that they invest in these projects.
