What is the measurable business value of your Data Platform?

Is the Data Platform an Elephant-in-the-room that your business avoids to talk about or the super-engine everyone wants to be seen with?

“We have to cut our IT costs by 20% and one of the costliest assets is our Data Platform”

“We need to modernize our Data Platform because the tech is not supported anymore, but it is difficult to convince the business because there is not direct value for them”

“It is not possible to calculate business value for an enabler like Data Platform. Individual use cases benefit from it but they could also be done without it…”

Sound familiar? It is simple to calculate the running and development costs of a Data Platform, but calculating the business value seems to be mission impossible. Or is it?

The fact is, however, that maintaining an asset like Data Platform without really knowing what business value it enables is betting on something and hoping for the win. Here’s an idea to test!

The Business View

Most Data Platforms are used to provide useful information in the form of data for one or several of these business needs:

1. Securing daily operations by feeding aggregated, refined pieces of information from customer master data to campaign contact lists etc. Information that is generated by combining data from (possibly) different sources and refining it into useful formats to be used when running daily business operations.
2. Helping people to make better informed, daily operational decisions such as what to offer for the customer (next best action recommendation) or deciding on the level of credit for customer based on their calculated credit score / risk.
3. Supporting business operations management with, for example sales reports or to analyze their own business or team related data, make workforce plans etc.
4. Provide KPI dashboards and reports to help midterm and long-term business planning and steering.
5. Enable regulatory reporting and compliance, such as financial closing activities, reporting etc.

Map your use cases with the higher level of topics to both help think of the value going forward, and to identify where the Data Platform enabler supports most: maybe it is focused heavily on daily operations success or regulatory compliance. These need different kinds of team, level of service and focus.

Once you have the business narrative in place, being able to tell your business colleagues “This is what the Data Platform exists for in our organization”, you can dive into the numbers. The easiest way to answer the question “what is the value of this” has in my experience been to formulate the question from the point of view that “what the impact would be if this did not exist?”.

For example, if customer service did not have the customer history available, what would they do in that case? What would take more time / not be possible? How often would that happen? To how many people? Challenge your colleagues to think about the consequences and the cost.

Instead of falling into to trap of thinking “Data Platform is not enabling this alone” recognize what the situation would be without the data that is now made available through Data Platform, and what is the efficiency gain compared to the other situation without this enabler.

The User View

How do the users really feel about the current solutions provided for them with the Data Platform as an enabler? Is it helping their work? Are there problems with trusting the data, or getting it on time?

If you have a process with IT to request help through service portal / IT tickets, use that information to map where the biggest challenges currently occur from user perspective: where there are issues occurring most often, what do users complain about most. Map this information with the structure created in the Business View.

The user view can help you also to communicate where your development investments need to focus on as the problematic areas from data user perspective can now be connected to the business value/impact.

The Technical View

This is most often the view used when identifying what the Data Platform provides for it’s users. It is also an important view, but only when connected to the Business View and User View, you have the total picture, and the narrative for business.

Data is typically consumed from data Platform using

1. Reports: through reporting platforms like PowerBI or sent via emails etc. Reports can be standard reports where data is frequently updated, or ad-hoc reports for specific needs.
2. Spreadsheets (yes, there is always group of “self-service analysts” who will extract the data to spread sheet for their own analysis)
3. APIs that can be called from applications to fetch specified data, aka data products.
4. System-to-system integration that feed processed data from data Platform to for example CRM or Finance systems.
5. Database view or database cube that more data savvy analysts or other roles use to analyze the data or build models.

Using these “modes of consumption” as lenses to list the actual artefacts can be helpful, also because typically you can use specific tools to get list of reports, list of database views etc.

The final step is to put all this together!

The Complete View

Connect your Business- and User Views together. And finally map the technical artefacts to the use cases. Now you have a complete picture that helps you to

1. Communicate a shared story about the business value of your existing Data Platform
2. Show where there is most value coming from and what that value is in business terms
3. Highlight the most critical development needs and the value of fixing those

It goes without saying that this is not a task for one person but requires group effort. Based on my experience, colleagues are more than happy to contribute to this kind of activity when they can share information they know and feel they will benefit from sharing it. The biggest blocker for "getting the business requirements" is to work on the Technical View level and ask from the business what they need.

So, involve business experts for the business view and user view, and technology savvy experts for the technology view. Then iterate together the full picture to ensure you have a common understanding, and a shared narrative about the value of Data Platform for your business.

Have you done something like this? Would this be useful for you to try out? Let me know if I can assist you more on this topic!