Do you really have a data strategy?
I read more and more about digital transformation and corporates aiming at transforming their businesses or embracing the digital journey.
Digging deep into these cases, sometimes you can be disappointed. Duplication of data, an overlap of roles and costly data lakes are still the reality in some companies.
How can we be sure to have a robust data strategy?
I try to adapt a strategy model coming from Prof. Hambrick (Columbia University) and Prof. Fredrickson (Texas University) to see how can we easily check if we are moving in the right direction. You can see the model in the chart here below.
If we talk about data, it means defining what data we need, which ones we have and how to use them. The amount of data has grown exponentially over the last years in every company. Most of it resides in systems dated back 20 or more years ago, not even designed for data management. And this is a clear challenge to overcome.
If we have a solid data strategy, we have decided what business needs we want to address with data. We have identified which data we can use and which data we can’t (i.e. due to poor quality or lack of them). We have chosen in which arenas we want to compete and prioritized them based on their contribution to the overall company strategy.
2. A strategy needs to show the way to get there.
Being disruptive, being digital, being agile are all fantastic and cheap slogans.
To make them real, it will cost some more effort.
If you have a real data strategy, choices have been made on how to materialize the value of data to foster the business needs. You may take a decision to focus on improving the quality of your data before using them or maybe buying the same data externally (i.e. customer information to derive a credit rating risk) to get speed and accuracy in one go.
You may also have decided clear governance and ownership of data, starting from Master Data. In an article from McKinsey, it is clearly stated how robust governance is key to ensure data quality. But it is also clear, based on my experience, as data ownership cannot be delegated only to the IT department.
It must sit close to those who care for those data, meaning the function or the business which is more affected by them. Only by doing this, we can make sure strategy is executed properly focusing on what makes sense.
The challenge here is in transforming data into information. To do this, three things are needed in my view: data need to be available, have decent quality and some intelligence needs to be added to it.
And to do these three things, you need to know what’s behind your data.
The question to answer here is how we will win, what will make us successful in implementing the data strategy. Every data strategy must be tailor-made on the business needs and deeply connected to the business strategy.
