Data strategy success – extracting value from your data
You’ve got data and you need to extract the most out of it. Figuring out what to do and how best to do it … that’s your “data strategy”. Doing it well is a matter of making sure the key pieces are in place: the resources, process, and tools that let you store, analyse, and act on your data.
The key to a truly successful strategy, however, is continual improvement. Always making sure your strategy aligns with your project or business goals. Always removing the barriers that arise or addressing the areas that get looked over. And, making sure that you’re getting the most out of the benefits your data can deliver.
Sound easy? Well, it can be.
This is the first of a five-part series where we look at some of the most important elements of a healthy data strategy, the causes and symptoms of a data strategy gone wrong, and the benefits and rewards of getting it back into shape. Each blog will focus on a different topic, but to begin with we’re giving you a taster of what’s to come:
- 1) Infrastructure
- 2) Attitude and adoption
- 3) Volume
- 4) Resource and expertise
- 5) Quality
Infrastructure
Having the right infrastructure to suit your needs is key, whether it’s cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid. Focusing on that to the exclusion of everything else, however, can be problematic for your data strategy, which is a common challenge for organisations that are migrating between on-premises and the cloud.
A good data strategy should accommodate and ameliorate any problems that arise from migration. It should focus on the architecture of your data too, meaning the ways that your raw data is ingested from its sources, how it is processed, and how it is stored.
Some architectures are suited to different infrastructures, while some infrastructures can hold your data back. Finding the sweet spot will unlock the benefits for your company.
Attitude and adoption
Getting your data strategy right requires buy-in across your organisation, which calls for change management and establishing a “data culture” where people understand the value data can bring.
To do this, you can start by setting up the right process and workflows that allow everyone to take part in using and analysing your data – what’s often called “data democracy”. This will allow you to create an environment where the benefits of efficiency, agility, innovation, and insight are shared throughout your organisation, top to bottom.
Volume
Depending on the scope of your data strategy, more often than not, the sheer volume of data you need to store and analyse can be overwhelming. What’s more, data often comes from several different sources, collected in different ways. It’s important, therefore, to get a hold of your unruly data by creating a data warehouse. A single source of truth that stores your properly structured data, accessible to everyone who may need it.
That’s what we did for our client, G’s Fresh, who needed to collect and store a host of different data types from its agricultural machinery.
Resource and expertise
Having the time, resources, and expertise can be one of the biggest challenges getting in the way of your successful data strategy. It is a complex process that requires many people who specialise in different areas to work together to keep it going and keep it healthy. Creating new systems that are more easily maintained and that use self-service analytics and dashboards can help minimise the need for resources and expertise.
Quality
As important as anything else is the quality of your data. Poor quality data is worse than useless, it’s damaging to your organisation. For your business intelligence tools to work properly and deliver insights to decision makers, your data must be free of flaws, duplicates, and errors. With good database design and BI systems development, however, you can automate the processes of collecting, cleaning, and maintaining much of your data. This can save vast sums of time, energy, and money.
If you want to check in on the health of your data strategy to ensure you’re getting the most out of your current BI tools and data, then try our BI Health Check – an unbiased view of where you are and what you could achieve.
