A Comprehensive Guide to Harnessing the Power of Data in Today’s World
You might have already set the sails to become a data-driven organisation and to invest in data analytics, machine learning or AI. However, like many other digital transformation leaders, you still struggle to figure out how to bring all that into a unified strategy. What is your north star that everyone will follow. Hang on, follow along for about 5 minutes and you will have a proven data strategy template to begin with for your organisation. Remember: success = planning * execution!
Why become a data-driven organisation?
In my previous blog post, I wrote about why we should care about data and the value of data analytics in general. Now let’s take a look at something much more concrete and tangible for why becoming data-driven as a business is so important.
According to a study, conducted by the MIT and AWS (Amazon Web Services) in 2021, 79% of the 357 senior business leaders that were surveyed world-wide saw smarter decision-making as the biggest value expected from data.
You read right. Not cost-savings, not more efficient operations, not more business – better decision-making is the biggest value from data. Better decision-making in fact, is the one immediate value we can see from data. A lot of other values, like the ones mentioned before, are actually outcomes from better decision making.
In a nutshell, data helps us to make better decisions. If data is collected, prepared and analysed and if decisions are made in almost-real time, we enable our companies to gain an ultimate advantage over our competitors.
However, if only a few teams in an organization are doing this, it does rather harm than good. A company is like a car engine. If a few gears turn faster than others, the engine will go bust. Thus, a solid data strategy is key to smoothly accelerate the car and generate sustainable value from data as one organisation.
Convinced? Next step: Data Strategy
A data strategy is fundamental to support better decision-making and drive growth. But where do we start? So many topics are going through our minds as we begin to think about data. We think of roles and responsibilities, goals, investments we need to make or security standards we’re obligated to meet. How one can bring all that into one proven business strategy template, has been proven by Tableau with their so called ‘Blueprint’.
A solid structure for a modern data strategy
The Tableau Blueprint is a business framework that has helped thousands of companies to create successful data-driven organisations. I personally have leveraged the blueprint during an exciting chapter in my career at Johnson & Johnson and can say that it has proven to be a superb, human-centric strategy template.
On a high-level, it is divided into three streams – Agility, Proficiency and Community. The agility stream combines three aspects – Deployment, Monitoring and Maintenance. Whatever data technology you go with, these architecture related aspects will have to be taken care of to ensure smooth operations and value generation with data. The proficiency stream combines Education, Measurement and Analytics Best Practices together. Here the human is at the center. Everything that we build with data, is initially built by humans. This stream is about building the capabilities our teams need to have in order to drive data value. Ultimately, the community stream is about communications, engagement and support. Its main objective is to create a data culture, where people are hungry for data insights, motivated to skill up and lead a more data-driven career. If those streams are taken care of, a trusted and governed data-driven organisation is being created.
Stay Tuned! Deep Dive: Analytics Strategy
Now that we, the digital transformation leaders, have a framework in our hands that has led thousands of organisations to success with data, we feel a bit more safe. It is the ultimate recipe for success with data. Having it available to us gives us confidence to go into action mode, because we know that whatever we create will be supported and grown by a truly data-driven organisation.
Now, what does action mode look like? As you could see in the strategy template on the very left – we’ve got to define the Analytics Strategy. The Analytics Strategy is where we define business objectives, roles and responsibilities, architecture and much more. Check back in for the next blog post where we deep dive into the Analytics Strategy.
Got questions regarding your data strategy or simply want to hear about some real-world use cases? Be kindly invited to get in touch with me here.
