Crafting your enterprise data strategy

Data is a strategic asset, and a well thought out strategy goes a long way in helping drive decisions based on data than intuition. There’s data everywhere, and everyone wants to use it to make smarter decisions, but the problem is that it’s complicated. Often data is in silos and stuck across systems that don’t talk well with each other. Then there are associated costs which are too high. In addition, most organizations prioritize urgent, tactical, everyday needs over long-term strategic initiatives.

So, how can we achieve a data-driven culture?

It’s certainly attainable, and it all starts with Data Strategy. A well thought after comprehensive strategy addresses more than just data. It defines a roadmap that weaves process, people and technology. It begins by asking thoughtful questions. Do we have processes in place to ensure data is of high quality and accessible? How can we enable employees by considering their needs so that they are empowered to make the most out of data? Do we have technology that supports the storage, sharing and analysis of data?

Your data strategy should detail out a plan to develop the data and analytics maturity to transition from making decisions based on hindsight to making decisions with foresight. In other words, move from using descriptive to prescriptive analytics.

Here are eight elements to consider when crafting your data strategy.

Data Maturity Assessment

Understand your current state by running an Enterprise Data Maturity Assessment. An ideal approach would be to survey data stewards and business function leaders to understand from their lens how they see the current state of data maturity within the organization as well as specific business functions. The assessment must at minimum cover areas around organization & stewardship, policy, data architecture, metadata, data quality, change management, business rules management, security & privacy, compliance & regulation.

Business Requirements

Define the business requirements by identifying an executive leader, all stakeholders, and SMEs in the organization. The executive leader will rally support for the investment. The stakeholders and SMEs will represent specific departments or business functions within the company.

Next would be to align the strategic goals and activities to the organization’s goals. It’s vital that both these sync up. Through interviewing key executives and leaders, we’ll discover what they are trying to measure, what they are trying to improve, what questions they want answered, and ultimately, the KPIs to answer those questions. By having clear answers to the questions, we overcome the main barrier of knowing what the business is trying to accomplish and how activities will need to be aligned.

Data Sourcing

Knowing what the business needs will allow us to focus on analyzing data sources, understanding how it’s gathered, knowing where it exists, roadblocks to obtaining it. It would also be a good idea to understand the data from privacy and regulatory angle.

Technology Infra Requirements

First, Pay attention to the business reasons for your initiatives and don’t fall for the hype of the latest technologies. A scalable and flexible data architecture is essential for success, and choose the options and approaches wisely. It is ideal to develop a conceptual diagram of the different types of analysis and storage needs that are to be captured through technology or process. Identify and represent all source systems, methods to ingest data and the landing spots for that data using an architecture diagram. Additional processes such as data governance and information security should also be layered in.

When building a solution to cater to analytical needs, it’s essential to consider a system decoupled from the application. It is also critical to assess whether skills exist in-house or make sense to leverage a cloud-hosted solution. Is the business need to enable self-service or generate printable reports. Is the access to the solution internal to the organization, or are external user access required?

The more requirements and considerations taken into the overall architecture will ensure the development of a future proof solution that will support the business’s goals.

Turn Data into Actionable Insights

Applying analytics to extract value from the data is crucial, and the data strategy should provide recommendations on how this can be achieved. Data visualization tools should make it easier for the users to understand and interpret the data. The quality of the visualizations, the context of metrics in the dashboards, granularity providing the right level of detail based on audience should be considered when choosing a data visualization tool. The tool should also encourage data democratization.

People & Process

It’s essential to consider the users’ skills to know their strengths and determine where they will need support or training. The organization’s structure also needs to be assessed to determine whether analysts should align with IT or a business unit. Adequate KPIs for employee performance evaluation should be defined. A data strategy, while it may appear that it’s more technology and tools but its vital that employees are encouraged and enabled to use data in ways the organization is intending.

From a process viewpoint, business processes may need to be reengineered to support or incorporate data analysis. This is essential since many organizations may have unintended roadblocks to decision making using their data. It’s also vital to ensure data points are provided as a rationale for making business decisions.

Data Governance

Data governance is the oil that lubricates the machinery of an analytics practice and allows sharing of data across the enterprise. A strong governance program ensures that the right people have access to the correct data, establishes data lineage. Developing a data dictionary and making it available to the end-users will prevent misinterpretation of terms and help identify and correct ambiguities.

The Roadmap

The roadmap helps make all the previous work actionable. It helps in identifying and prioritizing the activities that need to bring you to the future state. The roadmap will help define the feasibility, expected business value, ease of implementation, quick wins and RACI matrix for each recommended activity to take you to the future state. The roadmap should also describe a timeline that allows for tracking incremental successes.

I’d love to hear about your data strategies and how you develop tactical plans to realise value.