Assessment of information-driven decision-making in the SME

The use of analytics in decision-making processes is a key element for organizations to be competitive. However, experience indicates that many organizations still have not managed to fully understand how to use properly the available data for diagnosing, improving and controlling processes or modelling, predicting and discovering business opportunities. This situation is even more exaggerated among small and medium enterprises (SMEs). An essential first step for SMEs to start using analytics is a correct assessment of their decision-making processes and use of data. This will help them understanding their current situation, seeing the potential of adopting analytical practices and decide their approach to analytics. Therefore, the assessment we propose is managerial and strategic; thus, it is not aimed at detecting problems such as: errors in the data to make an invoice, not having the correct version of a drawing in the shop or a wrong date in a project plan... Undoubtedly, these issues are very important but they are not the objective. The results from applying the proposed assessment tool in several pilot SMEs are expected to serve as the basis for debugging the tool and developing a maturity model and a roadmap for improving their proficiency in information-driven decision-making.