The Importance of Aligning Business and Data Strategies and How to Get Started
Whether it’s driving growth and market share, containing costs or improving efficiencies, any business that has ever achieved its goals has developed and followed a short-term, mid-term and/or long-term business strategy.
Combining a business strategy and a data strategy can be quite complex. If the two aren’t synchronised, the end result is siloed data strategies that don’t deliver against the overall business strategy. A clear data strategy will always work hand-in-hand with your business strategy. Good data strategies ensure your data is optimally stored, engineered and managed just like any of your other vital assets.
As such, you should do the following before considering launching a new data strategy:
Evaluate business requirements and goals.
- What is your business strategy and what are your objectives?
- How can data play a part in helping you achieve your strategy?
Run a proof of value against parts of your data strategy to confirm the value and impact to the business.
- Purpose? E.g. get internal buy-in, low-cost way to learn…
- What form does this take?
- Who owns it?
- How big is it?
- How do you decide what to prioritise?
- What roles will each individual/team play?
- Do we need to understand the Organisation's Data Literacy too
Ensuring your team and departments are properly aligned and aware of your primary business objectives is critical. From the board members, senior and middle management down to the individuals who deliver the detailed work packets, every team member should be aware of your overarching business objectives and their respective roles in achieving them. Interviewing department heads and discussing the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis will play a key part in delivering business objectives.
Running a series of interviews and value engineering workshops allows department heads to showcase their key use cases where access to data can help deliver their business objectives. The key aim of the workshop is to collectively agree on a few business use cases to run a Proof of Value against.
Just as your team needs to be on the same page, your processes need to be aligned to match your objectives. Often, business processes need to be updated or altered before you can effectively work towards delivering on your objectives. But in most cases, the first step is accessing your historical and transactional data. In addition to offering comprehensive visibility into your entire data catalog, obtaining a coherent overview of all your data enables you to reassess and adjust your objectives as necessary.
To help you get started, we’ve created a checklist that outlines the steps you need to take to ensure a successful data migration process. It reveals the first steps you need to take when migrating your data onto major hyper-scaler platforms such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Snowflake.
