Secrets to Creating an Effective Data Strategy: Tips from Industry Leaders
Written by Practitioners for Practitioners
Some people think a data strategy is a data architecture; it is not. It is bigger than that. A data strategy paints a picture of how an organization uses data to achieve its business goals. It defines vision, goals, metrics, frameworks, and use cases that specify the people, processes, technology, organization, and cultural change required to achieve business goals. ?
Actionable Strategies. We, at Eckerson Group, spend a lot of time thinking about data strategies. It’s our specialty. We build actionable data strategies that provide a step-by-step blueprint to deliver tailor-made operating models, data architectures, data governance programs, data literacy programs, project/product management approaches, and self-service strategies. Many clients hire us to turn high-level strategies into actionable ones.
Our Guide to Data Strategy reflects the knowledge and frameworks we’ve developed over more than a decade of delivering data strategies for commercial and non-profit organizations around the world. This newsletter outlines the 18 assets in the Guide to help you understand, plan, and implement a data strategy. Some assets focus on data strategy, while others tease out higher-level elements, such as operating models, centers of excellence, and leadership traits.
Understand Data Strategy
We recently updated our primer called “Data Strategy Guidebook: What Every Executive Needs to Know” which provides a concise description of the “what” and “why” of a data strategy. In a worst-case scenario, a data strategy is a document with a lot of detail that gets filed away never to be read again. This Guidebook, among other things, encourages data teams to create visual rendering of a data strategy that makes it memorable (and perhaps transferable to poster format!) The report gives the following example of a visual data strategy.
It’s important to bring a data strategy to life, and that is the purpose of my podcast interview with Tiffany Perkins-Munn who runs a 275-person data & analytics team at JP Morgan Chase. A data strategy, by nature, imposes change on the data team and the organization.
Managing change is the most important task of a data leader and one of the hardest to do right. But there is neat formula to manage change that I wrote about in “The Head, the Heart, and the Herd of Change Management”. This is required reading! I also wrote about the findings from a fascinating book by Damon Centola that talks about how change happens after you reach a tipping point of 25% adoption. Read “How Change Happens: Driving Technology Adoption”to become a master change agent!
If you want to understand the current state of your organization’s data & analytics maturity and how you compare to your peers, take our assessment “Is Your Organization Data Driven?” which is an abridged version of our 250-questions maturity benchmark which we conduct with clients. Finally, “BI Power Struggle: A Strategy for Success” provides a brief analysis of the fundamental dynamic that drives data success and failure and the evolution of data products, among other things. It forms the premise behind the visual data strategy above and it’s served as a fundamental building block of my philosophy on self-service, BI personas, and operating models. It’s an oldy, but goody.
Plan for Data Strategy
One purpose of a data strategy is to convince executives of the value of investing in data & analytics. This is not an easy task! For data strategy clients, we typically create a separate, short deck that translates a detailed data strategy into business-speak. That deck shows executives how their organization stacks up against their competition, and what they’ll get from a data strategy and when and how much it will cost. One key chart is a visual roadmap (below) updated from the report titled, “How to Sell a Data Strategy to Business Executives.”
Kevin Sonsky, former director of BI for Citrix Systems, spent many years toiling in the vineyards building data governance committees and task forces. His work eventually paid off when a new CEO required business units to harmonize terms, definitions, and standards. My podcast interview with him shows the importance of working bottom-up and sticking with it, even when results are sparse.
This section also features a e-book on how to create an operating model that aligns resources across the enterprise and a report on how to empower, align, and retain data analysts. Data analysts are the lynch pins between the enterprise data team and business domains. So it behooves data leaders to pay close attention to their needs. Finally, Rich Fox offers powerful advice for designing a metrics tree, which is a key part of any data strategy and executive scorecard. Finally, I wrote an essay on why non-profits need data strategies, especially when they have few resources and budget. I’d love your feedback on that one!
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Implement Data Strategy
To implement a data strategy, it helps to see examples. “Constructing Your Data Strategy: A Business & Technical Foundation for Success” is a PDF of the slides I use in my three-hour tutorial on data strategy. In it, you’ll find anonymized examples from our client work, including our final slide in an executive summary where we “Ask” executives to invest in the data & analytics program. (See below.)
In this section, you’ll find podcasts with two successful data leaders, Mike Masciandaro, former, long-time BI director at Dow Chemical, and Shakeeb Akhter, current chief digital and information officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We also provide two articles on how to put a value on data, one titled “How to Measure BI Success” which discusses how to measure the intangible value of data, and another, “Analytics ROI: How to Measure and Maximize the Value of Analytics”, which is one of our most widely read blogs.
Upcoming Webinar on Data Strategy
If you prefer live content, we are bringing together several data leaders on Thursday, June 27 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern to discuss how to create, sell, and implement data strategies. I will be joined by Laura McCanlies, CIO of International Finance Corp., a division of the World Bank, and Rana Glasgal, Vice Provost for Data & Analytics at Northeastern University. See you there!
Sincerely,
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Eckerson Group helps organizations get more value from data. Our consultants have 25+ years of experience in all facets of data & analytics. Learn how we can help your organization create actionable data strategies and highly tailored solutions.
Rina, did you see where Radhika was doing a talk in NYC?