THE STRATEGIC VALUE OF DDDM IN BUSINESS FUNCTIONS: INSIGHTS FROM FINANCE, MARKETING, HR, AND OPERATIONS

Data-driven decision-making (DDDM) — grounding organizational choices in verifiable data rather than intuition alone — has become a baseline operating expectation across business functions. This article synthesizes recent academic and industry literature to compare DDDM's strategic value across finance, marketing, human resources, and operations. While the underlying DDDM cycle — define objectives, collect and clean data, analyze, decide, and evaluate — is common across functions, the study finds that data sources, decision types, and adoption barriers differ substantially by function. Finance and operations show the most mature adoption, reflecting longer traditions of quantitative measurement, while marketing and HR show growing but less uniform maturity, complicated by privacy and ethical concerns. The findings imply that a single enterprise-wide DDDM initiative is unlikely to deliver uniform value without function-specific adaptation.