What’s Your Data Strategy?

Or at least, what is the data strategy that your organisation is adopting?

Most of the organizations nowadays constantly operate with data internally or externally across an assortment of businesses. Well, in a way, this is expect and, to a certain extend, unavoidable. What many don’t realise is that, they will one day have a lot more data than they can manage, if they don’t start managing it now. Hence, the need to start planning how to use your data.

Agree?

Well, you see, by adopting strategies that are related to data, those companies will be able to enhance their data and technology investment and lower their expenses in the long run. A part from that, those who wanted to transition in to the digital world which will involve numerous of data and information. Before and during the transitioning, one of the most important steps is to create a data strategy that will be beneficial for the organization’s growth in short and long run and data will become one of the valuable assets.

Making a move or decisions based on past data incidents that happened are far wiser compare to relying solely on the top person’s instinct or their own predictions without any firm supports. Data are collected through past events; people could create a more accurate forecast through analysing these data and make moves that are best suits their goals or missions. Instead of making risky predictions, modern organizations tend to make use of the data that they have collected to grow bigger.

Definition

A data strategy is a plan of a business on how you could improve all the way you acquire, store, manage, share and use data. It is used defined approach on what we can do with the data that we will or have collected or generate within our product or the business itself. Organization can define their mission statement or redefine their strategy from that.  Breaking down your company’s end goal, knowing what results or matrices that you are looking for and from there, using the reverse method figure out how can you collect, store, use and share those data.

It definitely sounds simple on paper, but it actually going to take more efforts and time that you might think. Since most people don’t really know what they wanted to see and what can they expect from it, which is also the problem. However, this will eventually increase the overall understanding of the team or organization, with all the trial and error to keep improving.

There is no such thing as universal data strategy since it will most likely to be differed base on each organizations’ goals, missions, vision and so on. It is a fundamental step for an organization to create a successful data base. An efficient data strategy should be able to collect useful data efficiently, and able to maximize the values of each data through creating plans and executions that leads to positive changes.

Why is it Important?

Since digital world arises, businesses tried to venture into it to avoid being executed within the cruel business society. However, around 70 percent of transitioning failed and most of them failed because unable to adapt. Data collected and accessed are too messy, employees do not get to access data that are useful to them but accessing to data that they should not. In the digital world, data are one of those assets that are valuable to the organization and data leakage could be lethal to them.

This is why data strategy is one of the key for a successful digital transition.

Give Data More than a Meaning

If you are going in to digital why don’t make the best out of it, am I right?  With a well-crafted data strategy, it will potentially enhance the meanings of the data itself by creating more value to it for further usage. Data itself does not mean anything until you transform and make use of it. Meaningful data should enable organization or employee to make quality decisions and act as a direction in a whole.

Flows of data are escalating day by day.

More importantly, every individual are encouraged to utilize them as much as possible not to mention organizations or businesses. Unfortunately this causes data overflowing. And it is a challenge to keep track on all the data and filtering data based on its functions. This is where data strategy play its role to gather and classify all the data and in the end being accessible to the right authority without the need of frequent meeting and discussion.

Utilization of resources will be affected by the business’s data strategy, after all data is one of the component that are used to keep the business growing. If the data does not assist the business or a department to move towards the goal, it is just wasting the resources of the business. Thus, the fundamental of a quality data strategy is building it towards the business’s goals and how does data going to help.

Externally, data could be used to increase the relationship between your suppliers and customers. Creating products or delivering services that will satisfy them the most based on the collected data. Of course your data strategy must have built towards achieving that objective.

Well Defined Data Strategy

A strong data strategy should contain:

• Security
• Architecture
• Operations
• Deployment
• Data quality

These will ensure all the data assets that are being stored, manage and also shared under the best circumstance. For an instance, which authorities are able to access the data, and how accurate is the data. Besides, they should be measurable with the business’s objectives in the long and short-term.

In the data world, technologies are just one of the instruments to make it happen. A group of experts that could efficiently control these instruments are more important. Because, eventually they are the ones who will be creating the data strategy that suits the company best. These roles such as:

• Engineers: Creating data strategy that is scalable, reliable, and ensure its data quality
• Analyst: To analyse trends, insights, analysis
• Data science: Make preparation, prediction, perfection on data strategy

What’s the Vision?

In addition, before creating your business’s data strategy, you should have a clear vision, missions and goals as you should build towards that. It might become complex or complicated along the way if you are not well prepared. Moreover, building a successful data strategy requires a significant amount of communication between each team. This is crucial to ensure everything is moving towards the right directions and consistency.

Last but not least, data strategy of a business’s should be both defensive and offensive. Defensive in terms of its security, data privacy and well governed.  Offensive by using them competitively and beneficial to the business financially or not. For example, innovating new and less costly approach to engage current and new potential customers.

Conclusion

We should position data strategy as an empowering influence of the long-term vision. As this allows you to set the foundation that future business methodologies can depend on. Data strategy is driven by your business’s general plan of action. It’s the chance to take your current product offering and market it better, create it better, use it to improve your services, or to get a total understanding of your client.

In the past, data was only used in the office on papers related to accounting. These days data is all around us from the beginning of the production and after sales. It has caused remarkable impact in the overall market, evolving into something that most of the people could not have thought of in the past decade.

In conclusion, keeping data strategy from being absolutely mechanical or IT-cantered is not the ideal way of success. Instead, the interactions and communications between human that could assist businesses to deliver the best solutions to grow and improve.