A data strategy enables business goals and objectives by ensuring appropriate delivery of data management capabilities required to meet business goals.

Let’s examine each in more detail.

Cloud

“Cloud First” has become a battle cry for many companies – driven by various factors including the desire to optimise infrastructure (and associated costs) as well as the need to reduce dependence on internal IT support.

Does your data strategy plan for cloud?

What data will you store in the cloud, and for what purpose?

How will you manage your migration to the cloud?

How will you ensure that data in the cloud is stored optimally?

How will you integrate and/or synchronise cloud and on-premise data?

How will you manage the quality of data in the cloud?

How will the cloud affect your security policies, how will you manage access, or, in the worst-case scenario, a breach?

These are some of the questions that you need to consider as you plan for the cloud.

Self-service BI

Self-service BI has been a demand from business users for years. Now we see IT driving the demand.

The desire is essentially the same – to allow business decision-makers to access the reports they need to monitor their operations and make decisions, without a dependence on overworked IT staff.

Some key questions to consider:

How will we deliver the needed data to the operational data stores, data lakes or data warehouse used for BI?

Will we provide a catalogue of available data sets to allow users to find what they need? What about a catalogue of existing reports to allow reuse?

Are we ensuring trust in the data? Can users identify the data lineage, assess data quality, or find a common understanding of commonly used business terms, calculations or metrics?

Will it be a free for all or will we formalise access management?

Single view

Is a “single view” necessary?

In my opinion, any form of analytics or BI is dependent on a reasonably accurate and consistent single view of the underlying data set – be that customer, employee, product or whatever.

The lack of a single view means that either duplicate records or missing information skew the outcomes, often both at the same time.

A single view means that we consolidate duplicated information and group similar data together for completeness enabling the most accurate analysis

Data literacy

Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data.

How does your data strategy support increased data literacy across your business – from knowledge workers understanding the impact of poor data capture practises on day-to-day operations, to assisting decision makers to understand and assess the reports that they rely on?

Data governance

Each of the disciplines identified is dependent on sound data decision-making.

Data governance is about changing behaviour to optimise the value of data.

How is your data governance capability promoting collaboration between business and IT stakeholders, to ensure that data changes positively affect the ability of the business to operate and to make decisions?

What tweaks (or major changes) do you need to plan for in order to more effectively deliver valuable data?