7 critical elements of a data strategy.
1 like157 views
The document outlines the importance of a comprehensive data strategy for organizations to make informed decisions, improve customer understanding, and manage risks. It emphasizes the need for balancing offensive strategies that leverage data for competitive advantage and defensive strategies focused on compliance and privacy. Additionally, it highlights the critical elements of a data strategy, such as defining use cases, ensuring data accessibility, and maintaining technology alignment to support data-driven goals.
More Related Content
Similar to 7 critical elements of a data strategy. (20)
7 critical elements of a data strategy.
- 1. Make better decisions Data-driven decisions can help to hire the best talent, develop valuable products, invest in the right initiatives and so much more. Understand your customers better Anticipate your customers’ future needs. Recommend products and services based on previous actions and purchases. Personalise marketing Discover which channels and messages attract the most attention. Generate marketing reports that deliver actionable insights to your marketing team. Manage risk Continuous auditing helps to find compliance and security issues earlier. Smart analytics can identify and eliminate fraud. Validation increases data integrity. Improve internal operations Optimise internal processes by monitoring what happens when— and for what reasons. Share data and information across your enterprise to drive global, rather than local, improvements. Remain flexible and agile Focus on doing what you can with the data you have. Learn how to do more with less—using feature extraction and realistic objectives to deliver better value for money. Reduce costs Analytics informs pricing models for products and services. Sales modelling reduces inventory and work in progress. Detect and prevent fraud Real-time analytics can identify fraudulent transactions and activities. Find indicators that predict problems before they occur. Accurately assess the impact of illegal behaviour and where your systems are most vulnerable. Build a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts An effective data strategy makes sure everyone has access to the data they need, when they need it. A comprehensive audit trail means you can explore and explain decisions that are made and improve on them where appropriate. Data strategy 7 critical elements of a data strategy Create clear data-driven use cases Begin by identifying candidate use cases that represent what you want to achieve. All goals should align with your overall business objectives. Consider a single backlog (a prioritised list of outstanding actions) for storing work relating to your data strategy. Determine your data requirements With a set of business use cases in place, ensure that you have the necessary data to support them. The cost and effort to collect data can be high. Analysts dedicate more than 80% of their time to discovering, collecting and preparing data. Balance defence and offence Common goals for data offence are to boost revenue, encourage sustainable growth and increase customer satisfaction. Data defence focuses on effectively managing the privacy, governance and compliance of your data. Your goal is to find the right balance between an offensive and a defensive data strategy. The industry and the work you do will influence how you distribute your efforts to some extent. For example, highly regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare will require a greater focus on defence. In summary, a defensive strategy is about handling the risks that data presents. An offensive strategy is about leveraging data assets to create and maintain a completitive advantage. Zb stands for Zettabyte A single zettabyte is enough space for approximately 36 million years worth of high definition video Defence Offence Risk management Competitive advantage Privacy Governance Compliance Revenue Growth Customer satisfaction Regulated industries Competitive sectors Uniform, standardised data Dynamic and flexible data Choose the right technology You need to ensure you have a consistent and coherent technology stack to support your data-related goals. You may need to consider new applications and services or review existing systems to confirm they remain fit for purpose. Determine what capacity & capability you need Understand what new skills your team needs and if more people are necessary. Can in-house staff acquire the skills you need, or will you need external help? Educate staff, integrate insights The information that your use cases provide must be well understood by the people that can benefit from it. By sharing information in a format that makes sense, process owners can improve the work they do and generate real business value. Protect and preserve your advantage Supporting and evolving your data initiatives will ensure your data strategy continues to provide value. Models often benefit from ongoing refinements as you learn more about your services and how your clients consume them. A support function can manage this refinement along with many of the defensive initiatives that form part of your overall strategy. Smart data management is the responsibility of everyone in the C-suite. A clear, balanced data strategy will provide insights that drive decision making and maintain a competitive advantage. Please see our “The need for a data strategy” white paper for more details. Benefits of a data strategy 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 www.objectivity.co.uk 100Zb 75Zb 50Zb 25Zb 100Zb 75Zb 50Zb 25Zb 90Zb of data from IoTdevices 49% of data stored in public cloud by 2025 30% of data consumed in real time by 2025 30Zb of storage shipped in next 5 years Projected global data growth Strategic goals Questionable initiatives Localised or limited benefits Lower Effort Higher Effort Lower Value Higher Value Quick wins Prioritising data initiatives to deliver early& frequent value Quick wins promote stakeholder confidence and deliver early value. Strategic goals provide the greatest benefits. It is sometimes possible to break down strategic goals into smaller initiatives. Localised or limited benefits may add value at team or department level. The amount of investment should be adjusted accordingly. The need for questionable initiatives should be carefully considered. Discarding this work is often the best course of action. Get our free white paper