Data Strategy

WHAT IS DATA STRATEGY?

Describes a “set of choices and decisions that together, chart a high-level course of action to achieve high-level goals.” This includes business plans to use information to a competitive advantage and support enterprise goals. A Data Strategy requires an understanding of the data needs inherent in the Business Strategy.

Business Strategy

A good data strategy shouldn’t be created in isolation; it must be driven by your overall business strategy. Therefore, the first step in any data strategy is to consider your organization’s strategic priorities and key business questions. Only then can you identify how you might use data to help you deliver those priorities and answer your business questions. The data uses and priorities that you identify in this phase are your use cases. To ensure your data strategy is focused and achievable, I’d stick to no more than 3–5 data use cases.

Short-term adoption priorities

Also known as quick wins! Because the big strategic data priorities can take some time to implement and deliver value, I find it’s helpful to also identify 1–3 data quick wins. These are fast, ideally relatively inexpensive ways for you to add value and demonstrate return on investment from data – which, in turn, helps you gain buy-in for those more prominent data use cases. For example, you might do some customer churn analysis, to help prevent or reduce customer turnover.