Companies have learned to thrive — and in some cases survive — by leveraging data for competitive advantage. But how many organizations are truly data-driven enterprises?
“Data is becoming increasingly valuable, especially from a business perspective,” says Lakshmanan Chidambaram, president of Americas strategic verticals at global IT consulting firm Tech Mahindra. “Afterall, data can tell us a lot about a company’s processes and activities. It shows whether one is moving in the right direction, identifies areas of improvement, and suggests an appropriate process to make those improvements.”
Here are some key traits of a data-driven enterprise, according to experts.
To be a data-driven enterprise requires having a cohesive, comprehensive data strategy that applies across the organization. This encompasses technology and automation, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI). But it also includes culture, governance, cybersecurity, data privacy, skills, and other components.
“The market for data governance, storage, and analytical tools has grown considerably, yet enterprises are still struggling to wrap their arms around the scope of the challenge,” Chidambaram says. “CIOs, CTOs, and [chief administrative officers] must step back and establish an enterprise-wide strategy to harness the value of data for their enterprise and integrate AI to enable sales, marketing, and operational excellence.”
This includes ensuring that the data architecture provides both data professionals and non-technical decision-makers with the tools they need to move beyond instinctual and anecdotal decisions, Chidambaram says.
“Many corporate and government enterprises are leveraging data-driven insights for improving customer service, reducing operating expenses, creating new business streams, and achieving overall business efficiency,” Chidambaram says.
Getting an organizations’ leadership and workforce to commit to a data-driven approach is key to determining success, Chidambaram says. “Organizations must ensure that they [address] the following question to call themselves a truly data-driven organization: Is everybody willing to embrace data as part of the business culture?” he says.
It’s one thing to develop a data-driven strategy; it’s another thing entirely to effectively execute on the plan. That’s where having the right resources in place and updating them as needed is important.
“Once the strategy is defined, the people, process, and tools to support the strategy are critical for a data-driven organization,” says Kathy Rudy, partner and chief data and analytics officer at global technology research and advisory firm ISG.
For example, organizations need to have a process for building data catalogs; procedures and tools for data cleansing and data quality; defined data use cases and the right tools to support the use cases; effective and secure access to data for internal and external users; overall security to support the use cases; and a data center of excellence to support complex data requests
From a people perspective, being a data-driven organization means having a solid team of data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and other professionals in place, and providing the necessary training when skills need to be updated.
data governance is another component of the overall data strategy that warrants extra attention. Governance encompasses data security, privacy, reliability, integrity, accuracy, and other areas. It’s essential to maintaining a data-driven operation.
“Without data governance, you cannot trust that the data you are using is of high quality, is synced across data sets by a common taxonomy, or is secure,” Rudy says. “Data governance also provides the foundation for access to the data.”
ISG is often faced with disparate databases with differing taxonomies and ways of maintaining the datasets, Rudy says.
