Is your Data Strategy Balanced?

Reflecting on my team’s exciting journey over the past couple of years, Data Strategy is not one silver bullet that will solve all problems. It is a combination of multiple competencies that need to be in balance.

• Purpose: A successful data strategy has a strong connection to business strategy, with measurable outcomes and key results embraced by all levels of the organization.
• Context: To be useful, data needs robust definitions and usage guidelines so that its practical relevance is clearly understood by the organization.
• Governance: Data can be powerful as a universal language. For that, data needs to be governed by a cross-functional council with a high degree of influence, collaboration, and disciplined gatekeeping.
• User Experience: Data is only useful if it is presented in the right context to the right audience in a medium that is intuitive to the user.
• Execution: Keeping data clean and useful requires repeatable processes, comprehensive policies, and thoughtful roadmap of continuous improvement.
• Technology: Sourcing, managing and consuming data needs to be supported by an optimal landscape of tools and vendor partnerships that balance capabilities with performance, scalability and economics.

Neglecting any one of these competencies is a problem, but so is over-emphasizing one at the expense of others.

If your organization has a neatly documented 76-step process for troubleshooting and fixing bad data that is consuming high-value resources, Execution might be masking deficiencies in Technology.

If your organization has cutting-edge analytics capabilities and sophisticated visuals, but is still unable to tell a coherent story to guide decision making, then Technology might have crowded out Context and Purpose.

If your organization implements whatever it wants top-down and then struggles to get to a steady state or extract business value, then Purpose might have overpowered Governance.

If your data council meets regularly, but is unable to make decisions or get anything done, Governance may need help from Execution.

If there are a lot of complaints about data quality despite a lot of effort behind the scenes from very talented people, then Technology and Execution may have created a blind spot for User Experience.

Good news, all of this is fixable with a balanced Data Strategy!