Make Maximising Value from your Data your Goal for 2025

Article provided by Natalie Hayes at Data Light Solutions

Most companies now recognize their business’s data as one of their greatest strategic assets. Ensuring you make the most of this asset, however, is not always easy. Data transformation initiatives can appear to be costly and long-term, with a mire of technical jargon and complexity – whereas business leaders understandably expect a swift return on investment.

How can you get the rapid returns you need alongside delivering strategic transformation - to build capabilities and solutions which scale with your business?

Be driven by a business-led data strategy

Data initiatives should address priority use cases - the critical challenges you need to overcome, and the opportunities you want to take advantage of - linking directly to your business’s overall strategy and objectives.

The trick is in balancing the delivery of these high-value projects with the establishment of a broader data capability which lays the groundwork for later projects. This means considering a variety of elements which combine to create a framework which supports scalability, efficiency, and maturity. Then, as your catalogue of data outputs grows, creating a strong change management process; providing consistency in design across your organisation.

Balance strategy with agility

Whilst protecting live assets and data products, allow your team the freedom to adapt, experiment, and prototype. Innovation comes from being given the room to try different approaches, extract lessons from failure, and iterate in an environment which focusses on the long-term development of capabilities.

Start simple

Progress with data often follows a snowball effect, where small improvements can lead to significant, positive outcomes and inspire further momentum. A common starting point for many businesses is evaluating whether critical processes are still dependent on manually updated Excel spreadsheets. The answer is likely "yes," and there are various ways to optimise these processes. Options include automating Excel reporting, shifting away from Excel to more robust tools, or training employees on advanced Excel techniques to enhance efficiency.

Don’t overlook the ‘boring’ stuff

Within aviation there are a wide range of use cases aiming to leverage exciting, transformative technologies such as AI and machine learning. The benefits of these technologies is often realised when they are supported by solid data foundations – including data governance, clean and processed data, documented business logic, and well-defined KPIs to measure performance improvements. Strengthening these foundational elements is key to ensuring that AI and machine learning can deliver their full benefits.

AI isn’t just for data scientists.

The revolutionary ease of access to advanced artificial intelligence (such as large language models like ChatGPT) within the last 12-18 months means this technology can be incorporated into workflows across all areas of a company with relatively little planning, and low to no cost. Traditional training courses on how to write code, how to create formulas in excel, and how to use business focused data visualization tools like Microsoft’s Power BI are hugely augmented by immediate access to a tool which understands the language and can produce formulas or code tailored to your specific problem, on-demand. This means the ability to use data tools has never been more accessible.