Executive Strategy Meets Data & Analytics

A new pace has been set. Businesses around the globe face hyper-disruption from cross-industry digitization which is changing consumer expectations, driving the need for rapid innovation and introducing new business models. Technology, data and analytics are fundamental to this digital revolution. Every industry, every business and every function face a change imperative to hold their seat and earn the right to compete alongside the next decade of winning enterprises.

Data Backed Strategy & Operations

To be successful, it is the executive branch who must take notice. With hundreds of millions sunk in technology-first approaches, failed data gathering efforts, and with the majority of analytics projects never making it to production, executives need to step in. To unlock new revenue growth and drive operational efficiency whilst managing risk, digital and data must be a C-level conversation. Priorities and investments need to be aligned behind corporate strategy and reinforced with clear metrics and targets. To drive the necessary change, executive leadership must be the champions and advocates for a data driven business, starting with a data backed strategy, top line data-driven decisions to front line execution.

Company Culture and Resistance to Change

The focus of C-Suite and data leaders is too often the technology and efforts around data management and governance, however the biggest challenge and obstacle areas to overcome are company culture and resistance to change. Evolving the culture and working practices is far more difficult than implementing or operating any technology. Businesses have to confront a culture that values leaders who operate solely on experience and rethink hierarchical company structures and decision making. These traits thwart even the best data efforts to disrupt traditional strategies and business practices. Our businesses must become more agile, leverage democratized datasets and analytic insights to empower and drive faster decisions. In addition, executives need to create a culture of accountability, ensuring that data driven decisions are measured, evaluated and improved upon with growth targets. To enable this, executives must consider the change management needed to create an innovation and growth culture, fueled by data and driven by a sense of urgency. The days of lengthy, high-cost endeavors that take months, or even years, to complete are over.

Sustainable Technology Choices

On the path to embracing digital and data, executive leaders must drive for more sustainable choices in order to avoid millions more being spent on failed technology experiments. Sustainability is a cornerstone for the future business, requiring that coordinated decisions be taken to drive overall business performance in balance with long term efficacy. In the quest for agility and speed, many businesses have allowed for the proliferation of data silos, representing misaligned copies of data, inaccuracies and creating a governance nightmare. A more sustainable mindset demands that businesses establish a governance approach that democratizes data and analytics, providing business lines with self-service capability, yet ensuring that IT and data teams have sufficient oversight to do the hard work required to protect, secure and maintain data and analytic efforts.

Ethical and Inclusive Data Practices & Governance

It is the role of executive leaders to ensure governance needs are met, however governance needs to be re-thought. The role of governance has expanded to now include the additional risk created from putting data to work and extracting insights. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning forecasted to drive millions of automated decisions in the enterprise, it is executives who must have a voice and provide direction on acceptable risk. Is it okay to use black box algorithms whose decisions cannot be explained? Or does the ethical, legal, regulatory and consumer needs demand transparency. Furthermore, executives need to ensure that investments are made to mitigate risks. Many of the biases that are perpetuated by algorithms, creating ethical and legal challenges, actually arise from how the data is collected in the real world. Without diverse talent pools and sophisticated data pipelines, these biases can be left unchecked and lead to bad decision making or, worse, illegal actions.

Defining A Future with Confidence, Certainty and Agility

Executives can only win in the digital and data space with appropriate consideration of company culture, change management, sustainable technology approaches and governance that supports ethics and diversity. Executives can move forward with confidence, certainty and agility by setting strategy backed by data, and leveraging data to measure and optimize performance. Today, the leading and most successful CEO’s and Executives around the globe can be described as data or analytic savvy. They have honed their abilities and learned how to ask the right questions, make the appropriate investments and leverage data to make effective decisions. The digital elites of today are the companies who have weaponized data and insights, with their executive leadership setting the course. To be the future executive, you will be expected to have these skills and capabilities to run the future business.