Establishing an agile data strategy that is customer-centric and builds on trust

To stay on track for future growth, forward-thinking companies leverage a crucial asset: data. By 2025, 75% of the world’s population will interact with data every day, with each connected person averaging 4,900 digital interactions daily, IDC estimates.

Increasingly, firms are looking to advance a data strategy that provides perspectives and helps their leaders and customers gain personalized, timely insights. This is easier said than done. We all know customer needs will change as markets evolve, so developing an effective agile data strategy is an imperative. Today’s data tools have matured to enable end-to-end agile data discovery, helping the industry match up with ambitious business plans and evolving markets.

While firms must explore enablers for an effective agile data strategy, they must keep a sharpened focus around prioritizing insights, managing culture, building trust and upskilling teams. Failing to incorporate these key points can result in losing growth opportunity to other market alternatives.

Developing a giant data warehouse has worked well with high volumes of data — but not so much with the high veracities, velocities and varieties that companies must handle today.

As firms confront widespread disruption in the market and the need to innovate, they must prioritize the highest-value insights from their data. Development of such insights should be broken down into timebound modules. Work on these modules should leverage development of microservices architecture and evaluating if out-of-the-box industry solutions are a better alternative than building from scratch.

Often, adopting a fully functional, cost-effective external option vs. building in-house with longer timelines can provide firms with first-mover advantage in the highly competitive market landscape. This also allows them to build credibility for offering timely, innovative and forward-looking insights.

Developers must resist the urge to develop everything at once. Historically, if, say, a dashboard had to be developed, all the requirements first needed to be in place. Next, the developers would design and build the actual dashboard. In many cases, by the time the dashboard was fully developed, it was nearly obsolete or required substantial changes to stay relevant.

However, with an agile process, the core business and technology teams need to collocate, brainstorm and work together in the development cycle. Teams iterate through insights in an incremental manner with business users while being flexible to change.