Business and data strategy aligned

People talk or should I say waffle a lot about aligning business strategy with data strategy. 90%+ are clueless what this means.

It is not rocket science though.

Let's go through an example. You have an existing business process, e.g. selling ice cream. You are close to the business process. You are the guy who owns the ice cream van and sells the ice cream. Through some observation of your own (pattern) or some market analysis you have come to the conclusion that you should sell peanut butter flavoured ice cream. This is your business strategy. You take action and change the business process and from Sunday start selling peanut butter ice cream. How do you know that the change in your business process works? Exactly. You measure it. What were your sales before you started to sell peanut butter ice cream and what were they after you changed your business process. As you can see, data helps you to measure the performance of your business strategy. Do the changes to your business processes deliver the expected results. It doesn't stop there though. Data is not only useful to measure the performance of your business processes it can in fact also point you towards the type of changes you should make to them, e.g. by analysing your sales data you discover that teachers are the biggest peanut butter ice cream fans in town. Based on this discovery you change your marketing business process and target teachers with your ads and measure the impact on performance of this change in business process to your bottom line.

As you can see aligning business strategy and data strategy forms a virtuous cycle of continuous business improvement.