Data will make or break digital transformation

It’s common knowledge that the digitization of business activities will potentially bring huge benefits, it's also true that it will never happen without a solid data foundation.

Data is the major challenge.

The true measure of success is on the quality of decisions, the companies able to make the best insight-driven decisions faster will gain the competitive edge.

A solid data strategy is at the core of every successful digital transformation, as data is at the heart of every business. Data is the fuel for digital strategies.

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.

The answer to enhance digital transformation efforts is to focus on the data

This 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.

It’s an understatement to state that 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.

Data quality management and governance can make or break digital transformation initiatives, leveraging the value of data to improve customer experience and loyalty, support for new business models and using artificial intelligence to generate important new insights.

Digital transformation is all about agility

The need to address governance and quality cannot be an impediment for digital transformation initiatives, so move forward focusing on delivering the intended results and assuring that data quality management and governance have a major and ongoing role along the way.

Use an iterative, agile approach. Make continuous adjustments and keep going. You need to let the transformation journey unfold and evolve flexibly.  This will give your data management initiatives the necessary momentum to keep going. Organizing these initiatives into smaller sprints will make the changes more manageable.

Start Small

Approaching digital transformation by starting small is the best approach, the same is valid for data governance and quality.  By understanding the way in which to provide a framework that integrates into existing environments, using existing standards and allowing organizations to do something tactical with a high ROI. Focusing first on the tactical deployment, organizations can then build on the first success.