Actionable Insight Volume (ActIV) - value-based Data Strategy

With the explosion of data creation, many enterprises have found themselves chasing projects toward specific ends and then adopting an overall data strategy heavily influenced by the processes and objectives of those projects. Unfortunately, if your cart design is overly influenced by your current horse-power, you’ll be leaving a lot behind when that horse-power gets upgraded.

We have reached the ideal time to flip-the-script. Overall, what is the high-level goal of your data strategy? High-level because not losing data, having it backed up, keeping it secure, … these are foundational. From recent engagements, the high-level strategic goal is to get Insights. The largest current challenges come from the amount of data being created, in an array of data formats, in a variety of locations.

It’s tempting now to jump right into what types of analytics are available from your current infrastructure, which #BI packages make the most sense, or how best for your data scientists to generate #ML pipelines… essentially tactical level detail. These are all important but really ground-up project-outcome perspective, and not top-down vision/strategy based. It’s also tempting to get into more nuanced considerations like latency (for example). Again, a project-level consideration in this context.

With that said, let’s go back to Insights and focus on where value resides. While Insights alone may be interesting, they must be Actionable to be of any value. Now, I’m not saying that your decision to act on them may always be 100% yes, but at least drive a decision, and that decision may be not to act. Take great care not to become the hammer who only sees nails… sometimes the best choice is not to act.

Be on the look out for challenges. Perhaps, value in non-action receives an – “aren’t we data driven?”. Nothing like the reigning cliché of our day. However, being informed, educated, perhaps enabled, … by the data seems superior to driven by it. After all, if you just let the data do the driving here, you might as well turn the business over to #AI.

The bottom-line on these actionable insights is they need to be measurable. That’s where Volume comes in. If your data strategy is to be rewarded with budget to support all the various projects, it’s critical to show measurable value. From recent engagements, the measurable value had three top-level components: Quantity, Quality, Variance.

Expounding on these is too large for this post, but make sure you have the organizational support for ongoing access to as much accurate, validated data as possible. With an ActIV data strategy in place, you can now architect your solution with requirements to IT, SalesOps, MarTech, et.al. reflective of all those project-level considerations.

#CDO #ChiefDataOfficer #CDAO #CIO #CTO #CEO #CMO #datastrategy #analytics #bigdata