5 steps to a better data strategy

Too many people in the IT industry rely on the antiquated philosophy that suggests data is the “new oil”. But this cliché fails to capture the full value of data. Data gets compared to oil because it’s difficult to excavate and it becomes more valuable once its refined. However, there’s a big difference between the two resources: while oil is finite, our ability to produce data is inexhaustible. The more data is applied, the more value it creates, while oil once applied to one use case is spent.

Think of sales pipeline data. If all groups in an organization use the same data, it can enrich and inform upon each other’s insights and develop more value. While sales leaders can track progress against targets, finance can make forecasts and adjust spend, and marketing can gauge the effectiveness of a recent campaign, for instance.

Finding novel ways to use data sounds great in theory, yet too many organizations are failing in practice. Rather than making it easy for professionals to refine and use data, enterprise data strategies stop at the consolidation stage and employees get lost in a sea of information.

Trying to consolidate ever-expanding information resources into a single data lake is too simplistic. As many as three-quarters of businesses have experienced an increase in the demand for data, but 70% are gathering data faster than they can analyze and use it, says Dell Technologies’ research on The Data Paradox.

There’s constant tension in the technology industry between data consolidation and expansion. Organizational needs are so diverse that most enterprises are going to store data in a variety of clouds. Trying to consolidate this multicloud data will be a fool’s errand. To help businesses utilize their data resources, digital leaders must adopt a new strategy. These five steps can help organizations get to grips with the disparate data they hold.

The plethora of devices, services and apps across organizations create and use huge amounts of data. To unlock the value of data, businesses must develop a much stronger awareness of how they will use information to create insight or drive activity. That process starts with data collection.

In many cases, a business won’t have a clear idea of what it’s going to do with all the data it collects. Professionals might be tempted to erase data that isn’t useful right now. However, it makes sense to retain as much data as you can because you can never be sure when the business will demand fresh insights on new questions or find new applications for that digital asset.

The transportation of data is a complicated task in the digital era. Business professionals will look to move data regularly as they work. However, information resides in a multitude of data centers, cloud services and edge locations – and moving data can be a complicated and expensive task.

Digital leaders must lay the groundwork to ensure data is accessible in the future. They should think carefully about how to store data.