Data-Driven Decision-Making Process: The Case of Polish Organizations

Nowadays, information has been recognized as a strategic asset of an organization. Information has its own price and creates additional value for products or services. Information is also crucial for rapid operational decision-making as well as for creating strategy, policy and operational instructions. Opportunity for timely access to necessary data is the most important factor of organizational success in the market and should thus be an important consideration of every executive, manager or even employee. Unfortunately, today it is increasingly difficult to gain the necessary data at a right time. Data obtained from internal and external sources is a particularly big challenge for modern Information Technology (IT) systems, because it renders these systems too slow and not scalable enough. As a result, managers cannot gain the knowledge that they need to make optimal decisions and gain a competitive advantage over competitors in the global market. Analytics of company's data are an inherent element of the decision-making process which influences organizational and business processes in various industries. Executives notice, more or less intentionally, is the increasing role of information and analytics systems supporting this process. However, possession of data alone is not sufficient, because the company has to know how to use the information and draw conclusions. Data must also be organized properly and data processing should be described by consolidated procedures. Further, every data user has to know their role and responsibility in the process of data usage. Therefore, optimal decision-making and effective management of company information assets becomes very difficult. This paper presents the importance of data and information analysts in the decision-making process. The aim of the paper is to verify a hypothesis that organizations recognize data as a critical asset and effective data management is carried out by means of IT tools. To test the hypothesis, a survey was designed and conducted among various organizations from public and private and non-for-profit sectors in Poland. The results of the survey were used to determine the level of the maturity of an organization's data management capability.