A successful data strategy transforms a company's data into informative insights and financial gains — but it shouldn't stop with simple reports and charts. Instead, your data should help you look far beyond what's happening in your business and better plan for the future ahead. With this data at your fingertips and a well-laid data strategy, the possibilities are endless.
Harness your data and develop a sound strategy that supports your organizational growth and boosts your bottom line. Suppose you want to become data-enabled, start a data-driven transformation program, or grow your organization using data insights. In that case, a comprehensive data strategy is a fundamental must-have for your organization.
Whether you are already implementing a big data strategy or just starting, these four components are crucial in creating a successful enterprise data strategy that works for your company's unique needs.
Things to Change About Your Data Strategy
1. The Purpose of Your Strategy
Before you can use a data strategy, you must first determine the purpose of why you have it in place. How do you want to leverage your data and use it to inform business decisions? It's essential to identify what it is you want to use data to do. Without a clear strategy, your data won't inform your plans and decisions within the business.
There is no reason to create a new database for storing data if you haven't already established how to leverage that data and allow it to inform your decisions. Data uses are numerous, from reporting output numbers and funders to feeding data-driven algorithms that speed up your work and persuade people to join your cause.
If you're at the beginning of your data journey or are considering a new strategy at your organization, it may be an excellent time to assess what outcomes you want to achieve with data.
2. Your Data Management Processes and Practices
Data management is a crucial business driver that helps ensure data is gathered, validated, stored, and protected in a standardized, repeatable way. It is essential to develop and deploy the right processes to manage your data so end users are confident that their information is reliable, accessible, and up to date.
You can easily collect data, but managing, organizing, and utilizing that data can make or break the bottom line. If you're unsure how to process your data, work with a data management consultant who can help your complicated data system adhere to your business objectives and improve your bottom line.
3. Your Approach to Data Governance
Data in today's day and age is used for everything, and data governance functions, processes, and technologies should be constantly revisited. As you review your data, consider managing data quality, metadata, cataloging, self-service data access, security, and compliance across your enterprise-wide data and analytics lifecycle. Further, extend data governance to foster trust in your data by creating transparency, eliminating bias, and ensuring explainability for data and insights fueled by machine learning and AI.
With mergers, changes in data governance, executive restructuring, new regulations, emerging competitors, and other shifts in the business environment, a flexible approach to enterprise cloud data strategy tailored to your needs is the best option for many businesses.
Working with WCI Data Solutions ensures long-term business success
WCI Data Solutions supports partners in finding long-term business success when it comes to data management in a variety of ways. We support businesses with the following:
- Exploring the current systems through an audit of how your business consumes and uses data
- Mapping out an Enterprise Data Strategy that caters to the data needs and goals of the organization
- Building and executing a Roadmap that achieves these strategic initiatives
- Assuring long-term success by providing post-project support
4. How You Manage Change in Your Strategy
No strategy is ever complete without an element of change management clearly outlined. Adapting your culture to be more holistic and getting stakeholders to work together and formulate the business questions for your data to answer is not easy. Consider how you'll manage this change in your organization.
Remember that any effective data strategy aims to tie together the various components of your business data and better inform and discover marketing opportunities through these numbers. Whatever strategy makes the most sense for your organization, embrace it and pivot as you need.
And for all of the other questions you have, an experienced data consulting partner can help.
Need Help Developing A Successful Data Strategy?
The team at WCI Consulting lives and breathes data. Discover the best ways to manage your data, schedule your free, on-site discovery session with our experts, and spend half a day with people who know data inside and out.
