DATA STRATEGY – it’s crucial, not an accessory

Does the Data Governance or Data Management not deliver the expected value? Or worse, does your company not have any data program in place? Then the business might be delaying growth, losing revenue or being unable to reduce or avoid unnecessary costs… Let’s dive into.

The very first step of any digital transformation project, regardless of its nature (new CRM, upgrade to a new ERP version, migration from one database technology to another, to name a few) or industry sector (energy, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, among all others) is to understand the need for the transformation and outline the expected added value from the change. Based on these inputs, the current maturity is assessed to reveal pain points, identify business drivers, and therefore, develop a roadmap aligned with business goals. This is a proof justification for the transformation.

Data Governance or Data Management programs are no different. In today’s businesses, the amount of data generated and its business potential is increasing at the speed of light and companies are recognising that looking into data as a business asset to support better decision-making and business growth is as important as improving customer experience or launching new products or services. As with any other asset, data without proper governance and management can become a huge liability, especially when thinking of reputation or lack of compliance with regulatory laws.

Data Governance is essential to align business with data activities, define and implement ownership, stewardship and data accountability, standardise systems, policies, and processes, reduce operational friction, risks and costs, simplify management, promote transparency, monitoring and tracking, and increase data literacy and data value for better insights into the business. On the other hand, Data Management focus on how data is gathered, moved, prepared, and stored to provide high-quality, scalable, secure and trusted data, including how people, processes, systems, technologies, and performance will sustain the operating model to be implemented.

If the potential value of the data and the importance of Data Governance and Data Management were identified, then a Data Strategy must be developed to support the data program(s). It is extremely important that the leader of the program creates links between business and IT strategies to identify the opportunities and areas of improvement and, above all, describes how and where the data will improve the existing business outcomes. This alignment will translate the “what” into the “why” – from the business strategy – and the “what” into the “how – from the IT strategy. Also, this collaboration will result in stronger sponsorship support from the CEO, board and executives.

Without this alignment, adherence to Data Governance gets questionable, compliance to standards and regulations can be challenged, maintaining data assets will be difficult, and issues with real-time analytics, automations, and machine learning can arise.

Learning and AI technologies can emerge, and security breaches may not be identified due to gaps or siloed management.

Data Governance and Data Management are meant to improve data quality, precision, security, and accuracy for better decision making and automation for scalability, integrity and faster decision making. Therefore, they need an appropriate plan for:

• Describe how better data will help business capabilities and mitigate data flaws.

• Define the sequence of events and the reason for the prioritisation.

• Trace the vision of the future state and support the migration from the current state.

This is why Data Strategy is not an accessory to a data-driven approach and culture; it is indispensable for a data-oriented organisation by promoting the outcomes from the information value chain.

Let’s find out together how the strategy can leverage your data transformation program?

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by Rita Pinto

@ Passio Consulting