Drawing Parallels (1) - Data Strategy || Business Strategy

Any strategy is a plan of action to achieve a long-term goal. Business strategy is an organizational master plan to achieve strategic goals. An effective business strategy clearly defines exactly what the company needs in order to reach its goals, which then guides the decision-making process for hiring and allocating resources. It also helps create cohesion within a company that has several departments, as it defines each team's actions and ensures each department's decisions help achieve the company's broader goals. The six key components of an effective business strategy include:

?1.???Vision and business objectives

The vision element provides a clear direction for the business. It enables development of tactical instructions within the business strategy for what tasks need to be completed, and which resources are responsible for completing them.

2.??Core values

Guidance to leaders, as well as departments, about what should and should not be done, according to the organization’s core values. Defining the organizations core values helps to ensure that employees are on same page, and with the same goals.

3.??SWOT analysis

This is a core part of any business strategy, and ensures that humility, and self-awareness are present. Understanding of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats helps to define where the organization can win, and areas that must be addressed in the future.

4.???Tactics

Many business strategies articulate specific operational details for how to complete tasks to ensure maximum efficiency. Therefore, the people handling these tactics know exactly what to do, which saves time and effort.

5.??Resource allocation plan

This covers the allocation of existing resources, as well as where additional resources will be found. Most businesses rely on many different resources - people, technology, financial, and physical resources.

6.??Measurement

Measurement helps the management to stay closely aligned to the strategy, define deadlines and goals and address things such as budget concerns. Business Intelligence platforms play a crucial role in measuring performance.

In a similar vein, a data strategy is the foundation to all data practices. It’s a long-term, guiding plan that defines the people, processes, and technology necessary to solve the organization’s data challenges and support its business goals. Creating a successful data strategy requires business leaders to take a deliberate and objective look at the business through the lens of data and anticipate what needs to happen to bring about specific objectives the company has defined. A well-developed Data Strategy has:

?1.????Data centric vision

It includes how an organization’s data capabilities will be matured and new data- and analytics-based products and services leveraged.

2.???Guiding principles

These are high-level constraints to be captured before making any design decisions and implementations. These principles drive and validate every decision made regarding the data strategy.

3.???Business case/ reason

This refers to the role that the organization envisions data to play towards achieving its business goals.

4.???Design & Architectural patterns

This entails several attributes including high-level solution templates for common repeatable architecture modules, groupings of solutions that share common functional and technical requirements, logical and physical models etc.

5.????Operational Structure

Guidance on how human resources and interactions should be defined, maintained and scaled within the scope of data-related activities. This also includes proper skill set definitions for all such resources.

6.???Metrics

It is vital to measure success of the strategy so course-correction can be done if certain aspects are not delivering results, as per expectation.

?Now that the elements of both business and data strategy have been outlined, it would be worthwhile to consider how the two are aligned.

A case can be made that there are several other aspects of both business and data strategy and that case would certainly have merit. However, those aspects would typically follow a more organic process, one that requires less up-front effort. Instead, they will involve a harvesting effort in which previous iterations are turned into repeatable and reusable guidance and collateral.