Data + Drive

To become data driven...

To achieve competitive differentiation and the necessary advantage to thrive in a rapidly evolving complex business landscape by enabling more informed decision making.

Being data-driven has been a priority for organization for years now - yet for most of these organizations the result falls short from the objectives – very few achieve their objectives, and most will settle for dilution of value and mediocre performance, confronted with a situation where they simply assume that the investment was wasted and worse than that, accept to live with mediocre, under-performing solutions – expensive failures.

What does it take to be data driven? Data and Drive.

The challenge for organizations working on their data strategy is not technology, it’s cultural change – As Peter Drucker once put it: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – and becoming data-driven is much about the capability of people and organizations to adapt to change.

This transformation process never actually ends, it must be a continuous improvement process, and more important is should not be a project, but a continuous stream of projects.

The true measure of success is on the quality of decisions, the organization’s ability to make the best insight-driven decisions.

The digitization of business activities brings huge benefits, it's also true that it will never happen without a solid data foundation.

Data

A solid data strategy is at the core of becoming data driven, as data is at the heart of every business.

As data volumes and complexity are growing exponentially, more data is coming from sources external to the organizations and data spreads across on premises and cloud locations, there are critical challenges to address when data is increasingly hard to manage and govern, securing proper structure, quality, and business context of data, making it discoverable and usable across the organization is critical.

The foundation of digital transformation is data management. The underpin of any digital transformation lays on the trust and understanding of data, which can only be enabled through effective data quality and governance.

Enhancing digital transformation efforts requires a strong focus on data.

It requires a holistic approach that includes the processes of collecting, cleaning, reformatting, and storing data, but also includes the analysis of data to inform an organizations’ decision making, operations, and digital transformation strategies.

The massive amounts of data generated by business and consumer activity is an extremely valuable asset, although it remains an underutilized resource, with very few organizations actually getting tangible and measurable value from data or realizing actionable insights from data and analytics projects.

Building a strong data foundation will leverage the value of data to improve customer experience and loyalty, support for new business models or using artificial intelligence to generate important new insights.

Drive

Organizations face massive challenges to enact the changes needed to become data driven.

A few of the most frequently identified challenges organizations face when taking on transformation projects are related to lack of cross organization involvement, lack of alignment with business goals and benefits, with organizational changes, lack of focus, or lack of digital literacy or talent.

Becoming data-driven begins with establishing a strong data foundation, that will increase the quality and efficiency of corporate decision processes, positively affecting business operations, strategy, and performance.

Bottom line, business success depends on the execution and implementation of those decisions, and they are only as good as the data that supports them.

Becoming a data-driven organization is a journey.

A journey that starts with a vision, strong leadership, and a change in mindset – Enabling the organization to think differently and innovate.

This vision is turned into a data strategy that must be oriented towards the organization's strategic priorities and key business objectives, clear, ambitious objectives - objectives that can be clearly related to business objectives and evaluated by the business value they generate (cost savings, revenues, improved performance, or customer satisfaction).

Transforming into a data-driven organization is a long process, it needs planning.

A data journey roadmap is an essential tool. Mapping all the initiatives needed to complete the data strategy objectives, identifying the existing gaps between the current situation and the future situation, and most important the existing gap between business and the existing IT ecosystem.

It is critical to put business on the driver seat, to allow that all initiatives are driven and oriented by the business units. Transforming into a data driven organization is not an IT responsibility, it is a business responsibility, it is the business who better knows what their problems and objectives are. The role of IT in this process is to find the right technology and support the business units in this journey.

The priorities identified in the data journey roadmap allow to define the business cases to address first – business cases not use cases.

The choice must fall on small, targeted initiatives, where the impact and value of data can be clearly identified, business stakeholders that can passionately and effectively articulate the impacts of data in their business processes and that will be eager to defend the project.

Building a data culture within an organization is probably the biggest challenge in this process, and again, this change must be introduced in a progressive and incremental way. The same way that betting on small, focused initiatives is the best way to start, also the culture changes must be introduced in parallel and integrated with these initiatives.

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Embracing innovative ways of thinking and working, it’s easier once the results and the produced value are in plain sight.

A success story, even at a small scale will create the awareness within the organization and act as a motor to leverage the replication of that story in other business units.

When these initiatives are successful and deliver the intended benefits, business leaders will be encouraged to push to achieve more, not only focusing on what works well, but also on letting go of what doesn’t work.