Every industry today relies on data, be it finance, agriculture, logistics, advertising, or healthcare. Organizations use data to make important decisions on increasing revenue, reducing overheads, and ultimately, the company’s future. Let’s learn about key elements to create a data strategy you absolutely need for success.
Oftentimes, data is scattered across departments with poor communication systems. This makes it very difficult for an organization to respond both internally and externally to market trends and pressures.
As data keeps getting bigger, a cohesive data strategy is key in staying competitive in today’s markets. While no two data strategies are the same, here is a list of key elements that cut across all successful data strategies.
Table of Contents
1. Robust Data Framework
A data framework is made up of elements that allow an organization to collect, analyze, and implement the data. These tools and processes could include cloud-based software on on-site data hardware infrastructure.
To create a strong data framework, you first need to determine what datasets exist within the organization. Review data sources with the team that collects and uses the data so you can better understand how to store it. It could be a data lake or data warehouse.
Documenting how you analyze and store your data is key to creating a robust data framework.
2. Understand Everyone’s Roles
Knowing who documents company data and how they use it can help facilitate collaboration across departments and prevent inconveniences such as data loss or duplication.
Not everyone in the organization uses data the same way, and each person has different roles in data collection, analysis, and management. For instance, data scientists work with data and data analysts work to interpret the data.
Even if working data doesn’t fall among their primary duties, consider how each person in the company uses data and in what ways.
3. Data Strategy Should Complement the Business Strategy
Your data strategy should be in line with your business strategy if you’re going to achieve success for the business. As such, make sure that you set clear and practical data strategy goals that reinforce and advance the overall organizational strategy.
For instance, your data strategy objective may involve collecting user data for use in marketing. To realize this goal, the strategy might include a set of data collection tools to achieve the aim of generating revenue for the business.
As you outline what you want to achieve from your data strategy, make both short and long-term objectives so that you can consistently solve any problems that may arise while achieving continuous data quality.
The Bottom Line
Data problems are still a growing concern, notwithstanding the heavy investments companies have thrown towards data management. A simple way of understanding the importance of a data strategy is through this analogy:
Data to companies is like kitchen ingredients to a chef. You need a good recipe and a talented cook to come up with something worthwhile.
If you already have a data strategy, conduct periodical reviews to assess whether it aligns with your objectives as an organization. This way, you can adopt a comprehensive approach for collecting, storing, and analyzing your data.
