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Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

  • The volume and variety of data that organizations have been collecting and producing have been growing exponentially and show no sign of slowing down.
  • At the same time, business landscapes and models are evolving, and users and stakeholders are becoming more and more data centric, with maturing expectations and demands.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • As the CDO or equivalent data leader in your organization, a robust and comprehensive data strategy is the number one tool in your toolkit for delivering on your mandate of creating measurable business value from data.
  • A data strategy should never be formulated disjointed from the business. Ensure the data strategy aligns with the business strategy and supports the business architecture.
  • Building and fostering a data-driven culture will accelerate and sustain adoption of, appetite for, and appreciation for data and hence drive the ROI on your various data investments.

Impact and Result

  • Formulate a data strategy that stitches all of the pieces together to better position you to unlock the value in your data:
    • Establish the business context and value: Identify key business drivers for executing on an optimized data strategy, build compelling and relevant use cases, understand your organization’s culture and appetite for data, and ensure you have well-articulated vision, principles, and goals for your data strategy
    • Ensure you have a solid data foundation: Understand your current data environment, data management enablers, people, skill sets, roles, and structure. Know your strengths and weakness so you can optimize appropriately.
    • Formulate a sustainable data strategy: Round off your strategy with effective change management and communication for building and fostering a data-driven culture.

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy Research & Tools

1. Data Strategy Research – A step-by-step document to facilitate the formulation of a data strategy that brings together the business context, data management foundation, people, and culture.

Data should be at the foundation of your organization’s evolution. The transformational insights that executives and decision makers are constantly seeking to leverage can be unlocked with a data strategy that makes high-quality, trusted, and relevant data readily available to the users who need it.

2. Data Strategy Stakeholder Interview Guide and Findings – A template to support you in your meetings or interviews with key stakeholders as you work on understanding the value of data within the various lines of business.

This template will help you gather insights around stakeholder business goals and objectives, current data consumption practices, the types or domains of data that are important to them in supporting their business capabilities and initiatives, the challenges they face, and opportunities for data from their perspective.

3. Data Strategy Use Case Template – An exemplar template to demonstrate the business value of your data strategy.

Data strategy optimization anchored in a value proposition will ensure that the data strategy focuses on driving the most valuable and critical outcomes in support of the organization’s enterprise strategy. The template will help you facilitate deep-dive sessions with key stakeholders for building use cases that are of demonstrable value not only to their relevant lines of business but also to the wider organization.

4. Chief Data Officer – A job description template that includes a detailed explication of the responsibilities and expectations of a CDO.

Bring data to the C-suite by creating the Chief Data Officer role. This position is designed to bridge the gap between the business and IT by serving as a representative for the organization's data management practices and identifying how the organization can leverage data as a competitive advantage or corporate asset.

5. Data Strategy Document Template – A structured template to plan and document your data strategy outputs.

Use this template to document and formulate your data strategy. Follow along with the sections of the blueprint Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy and complete the template as you progress.


Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

9.3/10


Overall Impact

$51,119


Average $ Saved

32


Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Lindt & Sprungli (north America) Inc.

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

2

I'm not sure I had a good idea of what I wanted to get from the call, so in the end the outcome was limited. However, I got a few good nuggets and ... Read More

City Of Avondale

Workshop

10/10

$65,075

26

Howard was an excellent facilitator and very knowledgeable on the topic of data.

ENERGYUNITED ELECTRIC MEMBERSHIP CORPORATION

Guided Implementation

9/10

$6,850

2

Modesto Irrigation District

Workshop

10/10

$137K

110

The workshop was a big success for us. The deliverables are immediately useful and have jumpstarted our data journey. Gordon McMaster did a fanta... Read More

Dead River Company, LLC

Guided Implementation

10/10

$137K

N/A

Altium Packaging

Guided Implementation

10/10

$137K

50

Showing our progress and getting feedback on our current focus and next steps.

Wolf & Company, P.C.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$41,100

16

First Hope Bank

Workshop

10/10

$34,250

60

The facilitation of the workshop was excellent. The organization of the information and the pace of the workshop kept everyone engaged and I thoug... Read More

Halifax Port Authority

Workshop

9/10

$100K

50

Jean facilitated an open and engaging workshop to ensure active participation by all involved. This is essential to help create company wide awaren... Read More

Lindt & Sprungli (north America) Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$2,192

2

We are very early in with regard to understanding of Graph database technologies and their use so the discussion took some time to ingest and self ... Read More

City of Greensboro

Workshop

8/10

$37,675

29

The collaborative experience we aimed to foster internally was only achieved in this info-tech-led workshop.

Heritage Petroleum Co Ltd

Guided Implementation

8/10

$2,740

10

DKV Euro Service GmbH + Co. KG

Guided Implementation

9/10

$73,999

18

ITW Food Equipment Group, LLC dba Hobart

Workshop

9/10

$137K

100

Best: Focused time with the Data team and Senior Leadership to ensure alignment and document pain points across functions. Our facilitator was very... Read More

Westconsin Credit Union

Guided Implementation

9/10

$13,700

5

County of San Luis Obispo

Workshop

10/10

$68,500

10

Best: Collaboration, getting our strategic deliverables near done, having a knowledgeable expert to help us discern options and steer us to real v... Read More

South West Water

Guided Implementation

10/10

$6,840

10

Lifeway Christian Resources

Guided Implementation

10/10

$13,700

5

RCL Group Services (Pty) Ltd

Guided Implementation

9/10

$20,500

10

Best: - Clarity of insight and explanation. - Practical experience - Relevance Worst: (from my team's perspective) -- they have to do more wo... Read More

Wolf & Company, P.C.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$34,250

20

South West Water

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

1

County of Clark Nevada

Guided Implementation

10/10

$137K

55

There was no worst part. It was all very beneficial. The best part was Andrea understood our problem and need without us having to go into much det... Read More

CURLING CANADA

Guided Implementation

10/10

$13,000

26

National Institutes of Health

Guided Implementation

10/10

$68,562

115

Destination Cleveland

Workshop

9/10

$13,700

20

South West Water

Guided Implementation

8/10

$2,565

2

Toll Brothers Inc

Guided Implementation

8/10

$13,700

35

Savings on hiring consultant

Ferrellgas Partners, L.P.

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

10

I received great advice for communicating the key information within the data strategy. I was provided with slides that aligned with the message t... Read More

Aipso

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

5

Richter Management Ltd.

Guided Implementation

9/10

$1,900

10

with the help of Crystal we were able to understand and get started on our data strategy This topic was a bit more mature than our current stage a... Read More


Workshop: Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Establish Business Context and Value: Understand the Current Business Environment

The Purpose

  • Establish the business context for the business strategy.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • Substantiates the “why” of the data strategy.
  • Highlights the organization’s goals, objectives, and strategic direction the data must align with.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Data Strategy 101

1.2

Intro to Tech’s Data Strategy Framework

1.3

Data Strategy Value Proposition: Understand stakeholder’s strategic priorities and the alignment with data

  • Business context; strategic drivers
1.4

Discuss the importance of vision, mission, and guiding principles of the organization’s data strategy

  • Data strategy guiding principles
  • Sample vision and mission statements
1.5

Understand the organization’s data culture – discuss Data Culture Survey results

  • Data Culture Diagnostic Results Analysis
1.6

Examine Core Value Streams of Business Architecture

Module 2: Business-Data Needs Discovery: Key Business Stakeholder Interviews

The Purpose

  • Build use cases of demonstrable value and understand the current environment.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • An understanding of the current maturity level of key capabilities.
  • Use cases that represent areas of concern and/or high value and therefore need to be addressed.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Conduct key business stakeholder interviews to initiate the build of high-value business-data cases

  • Initialized high-value business-data cases

Module 3: Understand the Current Data Environment & Practice: Analyze Data Capability and Practice Gaps and Develop Alignment Strategies

The Purpose

  • Build out a future state plan that is aimed at filling prioritized gaps and that informs a scalable roadmap for moving forward on treating data as an asset.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • A target state plan, formulated with input from key stakeholders, for addressing gaps and for maturing capabilities necessary to strategically manage data.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Understand the current data environment: data capability assessment

  • Data capability assessment and roadmapping tool
3.2

Understand the current data practice: key data roles, skill sets; operating model, organization structure

3.3

Plan target state data environment and data practice

Module 4: Align Business Needs with Data Implications: Initiate Roadmap Planning and Strategy Formulation

The Purpose

  • Consolidate business and data needs with consideration of external factors as well as internal barriers and enablers to the success of the data strategy. Bring all the outputs together for crafting a robust and comprehensive data strategy.

Key Benefits Achieved

  • A consolidated view of business and data needs and the environment in which the data strategy will be operationalized.
  • An analysis of the feasibility and potential risks to the success of the data strategy.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Analyze gaps between current- and target-state

  • Data Strategy Next Steps Action Plan
4.2

Initiate initiative, milestone and RACI planning

4.3

Working session with Data Strategy Owner

  • Relevant data strategy related templates (example: data practice patterns, data role patterns)
  • Initialized Data Strategy on-a-Page

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Data Strategy: Key to helping drive organizational innovation and transformation

"In the dynamic environment in which we operate today, where we are constantly juggling disruptive forces, a well-formulated data strategy will prove to be a key asset in supporting business growth and sustainability, innovation, and transformation.

Your data strategy must align with the organization’s business strategy, and it is foundational to building and fostering an enterprise-wide data-driven culture."

Crystal Singh,

Director – Research and Advisory

Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research is Designed For:

  • Chief data officers (CDOs), chief architects, VPs, and digital transformation directors and CIOs who are accountable for ensuring data can be leveraged as a strategic asset of the organization.

This Research Will Help You:

  • Put a strategy in place to ensure data is available, accessible, well integrated, secured, of acceptable quality, and suitably visualized to fuel decision making by the organizations’ executives.
  • Align data management plans and investments with business requirements and the organization’s strategic plans.
  • Define the relevant roles for operationalizing your data strategy.

This Research Will Also Assist:

  • Data architects and enterprise architects who have been tasked with supporting the formulation or optimization of the organization’s data strategy.
  • Business leaders creating plans for leveraging data in their strategic planning and business processes.
  • IT professionals looking to improve the environment that manages and delivers data.

This Research Will Help Them:

  • Get a handle on the current situation of data within the organization.
  • Understand how the data strategy and its resulting initiatives will affect the operations, integration, and provisioning of data within the enterprise.

Executive Summary

Situation

  • The volume and variety of data that organizations have been collecting and producing have been growing exponentially and show no sign of slowing down. At the same time, business landscapes and models are evolving, and users and stakeholders are becoming more and more data centric, with maturing and demanding expectations.

Complication

  • As organizations pivot in response to industry disruptions and changing landscapes, a reactive and piecemeal approach leads to data architectures and designs that fail to deliver real and measurable value to the business.
  • Despite the growing focus on data, many organizations struggle to develop a cohesive business-driven strategy for effectively managing and leveraging their data assets.

Resolution

Formulate a data strategy that stitches all of the pieces together to better position you to unlock the value in your data:

  • Establish the business context and value: Identify key business drivers for executing on an optimized data strategy, build compelling and relevant use cases, understand your organization’s culture and appetite for data, and ensure you have well-articulated vision, principles, and goals for your data strategy.
  • Ensure you have a solid data foundation: Understand your current data environment, data management enablers, people, skill sets, roles, and structure. Know your strengths and weakness so you can optimize appropriately.
  • Formulate a sustainable data strategy: Round off your strategy with effective change management and communication for building and fostering a data-driven culture.

Info-Tech Insight

  1. As the CDO or equivalent data leader in your organization, a robust and comprehensive data strategy is the number one tool in your toolkit for delivering on your mandate of creating measurable business value from data.
  2. A data strategy should never be formulated disjointed from the business. Ensure the data strategy aligns with the business strategy and supports the business architecture.
  3. Building and fostering a data-driven culture will accelerate and sustain adoption of, appetite for, and appreciation for data and hence drive the ROI on your various data investments.

Why do you need a data strategy?

Your data strategy is the vehicle for ensuring data is poised to support your organization’s strategic objectives.

The dynamic marketplace of today requires organizations to be responsive in order to gain or maintain their competitive edge and place in their industry.

Organizations need to have that 360-degree view of what’s going on and what’s likely to happen.

Disruptive forces often lead to changes in business models and require organizations to have a level of adaptability to remain relevant.

To respond, organizations need to make decisions and should be able to turn to their data to gain insights for informing their decisions.

A well-formulated and robust data strategy will ensure that your data investments bring you the returns by meeting your organization’s strategic objectives.

Organizations need to be in a position where they know what’s going on with their stakeholders and anticipate what their stakeholders’ needs are going to be.

A data strategy is needed and is relevant across industries

Data and its associated data strategy is not only relevant for profit-generating industries.

The bottom line: data is valuable to everyone.

Regardless of the industry in which you operate, data is still the key to informed decision making. So whether you’re a nonprofit, a government entity, or in any other industry, data still empowers you to make better decisions.

The data strategy will serve as the mechanism for making good-quality and well-governed data readily available and accessible to deliver on your organizational mandate.

Whether your key stakeholders are customers, students, patients, donors, residents, or citizens, an effective data strategy will ensure you have the right data to make the right decisions in the interests of your stakeholder groups.

“Data have the power to enable the government to make better decisions, design better programs and deliver more effective services.”

“But for this to occur— and for us to share data in a way that allows other governments, businesses, researchers and the not-for-profit sector to also extract value from data—we need to refresh our approach.”– Privy Council Office, Government of Canada

Data cannot be fully leveraged without a cohesive strategy

Most organizations today will likely have some form of data management in place, supported by some of the common roles such as DBAs and data analysts.

Most will likely have a data architecture that supports some form of reporting.

Some may even have a chief data officer (CDO), a senior executive who has a seat at the C-suite table.

These are all great assets as a starting point BUT without a cohesive data strategy that stitches the pieces together and:

  • Effectively leverages these existing assets
  • Augments them with additional and relevant key roles and skills sets
  • Optimizes and fills in the gaps around your current data management enablers and capabilities for the growing volume and variety of data you’re collecting
  • Fully caters to real, high-value strategic organizational business needs

you’re missing the mark – you are not fully leveraging the incredible value of your data.

Cross-industry studies show that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions

And, less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. Furthermore, 80% of analysts' time is spent simply discovering and preparing, data with over 70% of employees having access to data they should not. Source: HBR, 2017

Organizational drivers for a data strategy

Your data strategy needs to align with your organizational strategy.

Main Organizational Strategic Drivers:

  1. Stakeholder Engagement/Service Excellence
  2. Product and Service Innovations
  3. Operational Excellence
  4. Privacy, Risk, and Compliance Management

“The companies who will survive and thrive in the future are the ones who will outlearn and out-innovate everyone else. It is no longer ‘survival of the fittest’ but ‘survival of the smartest.’ Data is the element that both inspires and enables this new form of rapid innovation.– Joel Semeniuk, 2016

A sound data strategy is the key to unlocking the value in your organization’s data.

Data should be at the foundation of your organization’s evolution.

The transformational insights that executives are constantly seeking to leverage can be unlocked with a data strategy that makes high-quality, well-integrated, trustworthy, relevant data readily available to the business users who need it.

Whether hoping to gain a better understanding of your business, trying to become an innovator in your industry, or having a compliance and regulatory mandate that needs to be met, any organization can get value from its data through a well-formulated, robust, and cohesive data strategy.

According to a leading North American bank, “More than one petabyte of new data, equivalent to about 1 million gigabytes” is entering the bank’s systems every month. – The Wall Street Journal, 2019

“Although businesses are at many different stages in unlocking the power of data, they share a common conviction that it can make or break an enterprise.”– Jim Love, ITWC CIO and Chief Digital Officer, IT World Canada, 2018

Data is a strategic organizational asset and should be treated as such

The expression “Data is an asset” or any other similar sentiment has long been heard.

With such hype, you would have expected data to have gotten more attention in the boardrooms. You would have expected to see its value reflected on financial statements as a result of its impact in driving things like acquisition, retention, product and service development and innovation, market growth, stakeholder satisfaction, relationships with partners, and overall strategic success of the organization.

The time has surely come for data to be treated as the asset it is.

“Paradoxically, “data” appear everywhere but on the balance sheet and income statement.”– HBR, 2018

“… data has traditionally been perceived as just one aspect of a technology project; it has not been treated as a corporate asset.”– “5 Essential Components of a Data Strategy,” SAS

According to Anil Chakravarthy, who is the CEO of Informatica and has a strong vantage point on how companies across industries leverage data for better business decisions, “what distinguishes the most successful businesses … is that they have developed the ability to manage data as an asset across the whole enterprise.”– McKinsey & Company, 2019

How data is perceived in today’s marketplace

Data is being touted as the oil of the digital era…

But just like oil, if left unrefined, it cannot really be used.

"Data is the new oil." – Clive Humby, Chief Data Scientist

Source: Joel Semeniuk, 2016

Enter your data strategy.

Data is being perceived as that key strategic asset in your organization for fueling innovation and transformation.

Your data strategy is what allows you to effectively mine, refine, and use this resource.

“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”– The Economist, 2017

“Modern innovation is now dependent upon this data.”– Joel Semeniuk, 2016

“The better the data, the better the resulting innovation and impact.”– Joel Semeniuk, 2016

What is it in it for you? What opportunities can data help you leverage?

GOVERNMENT

Leveraging data as a strategic asset for the benefit of citizens.

  • The strategic use of data can enable governments to provide higher-quality services.
  • Direct resources appropriately and harness opportunities to improve impact.
  • Make better evidence-informed decisions and better understand the impact of programs so that funds can be directed to where they are most likely to deliver the best results.
  • Maintain legitimacy and credibility in an increasingly complex society.
  • Help workers adapt and be competitive in a changing labor market.
  • A data strategy would help protect citizens from the misuse of their data.

Source: Privy Council Office, Government of Canada, 2018

What is it in it for you? What opportunities can data help you leverage?

FINANCIAL

Leveraging data to boost traditional profit and loss levers, find new sources of growth, and deliver the digital bank.

  • One bank used credit card transactional data (from its own terminals and those of other banks) to develop offers that gave customers incentives to make regular purchases from one of the bank’s merchants. This boosted the bank’s commissions, added revenue for its merchants, and provided more value to the customer (McKinsey & Company, 2017).
  • In terms of enhancing productivity, a bank used “new algorithms to predict the cash required at each of its ATMs across the country and then combined this with route-optimization techniques to save money” (McKinsey & Company, 2017).

A European bank “turned to machine-learning algorithms that predict which currently active customers are likely to reduce their business with the bank.” The resulting understanding “gave rise to a targeted campaign that reduced churn by 15 percent” (McKinsey & Company, 2017).

A leading Canadian bank has built a marketplace around their data – they have launched a data marketplace where they have productized the bank’s data. They are providing data – as a product – to other units within the bank. These other business units essentially represent internal customers who are leveraging the product, which is data.

Through the use of data and advanced analytics, “a top bank in Asia discovered unsuspected similarities that allowed it to define 15,000 microsegments in its customer base. It then built a next-product-to-buy model that increased the likelihood to buy three times over.” Several sets of big data were explored, including “customer demographics and key characteristics, products held, credit-card statements, transaction and point-of-sale data, online and mobile transfers and payments, and credit-bureau data” (McKinsey & Company, 2017).

What is it in it for you? What opportunities can data help you leverage?

HEALTHCARE

Leveraging data and analytics to prevent deadly infections

The fifth-largest health system in the US and the largest hospital provider in California uses a big data and advanced analytics platform to predict potential sepsis cases at the earliest stages, when intervention is most helpful.

Using the Sepsis Bio-Surveillance Program, this hospital provider monitors 120,000 lives per month in 34 hospitals and manages 7,500 patients with potential sepsis per month.

Collecting data from the electronic medical records of all patients in its facilities, the solution uses natural language processing (NLP) and a rules engine to continually monitor factors that could indicate a sepsis infection. In high-probability cases, the system sends an alarm to the primary nurse or physician.

Since implementing the big data and predictive analytics system, this hospital provider has seen a significant improvement in the mortality and the length of stay in ICU for sepsis patients.

At 28 of the hospitals which have been on the program, sepsis mortality rates have dropped an average of 5%.

With patients spending less time in the ICU, cost savings were also realized. This is significant, as sepsis is the costliest condition billed to Medicare, the second costliest billed to Medicaid and the uninsured, and the fourth costliest billed to private insurance.

Source: SAS, 2019

What is it in it for you? What opportunities can data help you leverage?

RETAIL

Leveraging data to better understand customer preferences, predict purchasing, drive customer experience, and optimize supply and demand planning.

Netflix is an example of a big brand that uses big data analytics for targeted advertising. With over 100 million subscribers, the company collects large amounts of data. If you are a subscriber, you are likely familiar with their suggestions messages of the next series or movie you should catch up on. These suggestions are based on your past search data and watch data. This data provides Netflix with insights into your interests and preferences for viewing (Mentionlytics, 2018).

“For the retail industry, big data means a greater understanding of consumer shopping habits and how to attract new customers.”– Ron Barasch, Envestnet | Yodlee, 2019

The business case for data – moving from platitudes to practicality

When building your business case, consider the following:

  • What is the most effective way to communicate the business case to executives?
  • How can CDOs and other data leaders use data to advance their organizations’ corporate strategy?
  • What does your data estate look like? Are you looking to leverage and drive value from your semi-structured and unstructured data assets?
  • Does your current organizational culture support a data-driven one? Does the organization have a history of managing change effectively?
  • How do changing privacy and security expectations alter the way businesses harvest, save, use, and exchange data?

“We’re the converted … We see the value in data. The battle is getting executive teams to see it our way.”– Ted Maulucci, President of SmartONE Solutions Inc. IT World Canada, 2018

Where do you stack up? What is your current data management maturity?

Info-Tech’s IT Maturity Ladder denotes the different levels of maturity for an IT department and its different functions. What is the current state of your data management capability?

Innovator - Transforms the Business. Business Partner - Expands the Business. Trusted Operator - Optimizes the Business. Firefighter - Supports the Business. Unstable - Struggles to Support.

Info-Tech Insight

You are best positioned to successfully execute on a data strategy if you are currently at or above the Trusted Operator level. If you find yourself still at the Unstable or Firefighter stage, your efforts are best spent on ensuring you can fulfill your day-to-day data and data management demands. Improving this capability will help build a strong data management foundation.

Guiding principles of a data strategy

Value of Clearly Defined Data Principles

  • Guiding principles help define the culture and characteristics of your practice by describing your beliefs and philosophy.
  • Guiding principles act as the heart of your data strategy, helping to shape initiative plans and day-to-day behaviors related to the use and treatment of the organization’s data assets.

“Organizational culture can accelerate the application of analytics, amplify its power, and steer companies away from risky outcomes.”– McKinsey, 2018

Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy

Business Strategy and Current Environment connect with the Data Strategy. Data Strategy includes: Organizational Drivers and Data Value, Data Strategy Objectives and Guiding Principles, Data Strategy Vision and Mission, Data Strategy Roadmap, People: Roles and Organizational Structure, Data Culture and Data Literacy, Data Management and Tools, Risk and Feasibility.

Follow Info-Tech’s methodology for effectively leveraging the value out of your data

Some say it’s the new oil. Or the currency of the new business landscape. Others describe it as the fuel of the digital economy. But we don’t need platitudes — we need real ways to extract the value from our data. – Jim Love, CIO and Chief Digital Officer, IT World Canada, 2018

1. Business Context. 2. Data and Resources Foundation. 3. Effective Data Strategy

Our practical step-by-step approach helps you to formulate a data strategy that delivers business value.

  1. Establish Business Context and Value: In this phase, you will determine and substantiate the business drivers for optimizing the data strategy. You will identify the business drivers that necessitate the data strategy optimization and examine your current organizational data culture. This will be key to ensuring the fruits of your optimization efforts are being used. You will also define the vision, mission, and guiding principles and build high-value use cases for the data strategy.
  2. Ensure You Have a Solid Data and Resources Foundation: This phase will help you ensure you have a solid data and resources foundation for operationalizing your data strategy. You will gain an understanding of your current environment in terms of data management enablers and the required resources portfolio of key people, roles, and skill sets.
  3. Formulate a Sustainable Data Strategy: In this phase, you will bring the pieces together for formulating an effective data strategy. You will evaluate and prioritize the use cases built in Phase 1, which summarize the alignment of organizational goals with data needs. You will also create your strategic plan, considering change management and communication.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

9.3/10
Overall Impact

$51,119
Average $ Saved

32
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

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Guided Implementation 1: Establish Business Context and Value
  • Call 1: Understand what a data strategy is and why it needs to be aligned with the organizational strategy.
  • Call 2: Identify the business drivers that necessitate optimizing the data strategy.
  • Call 3: Create a tactical plan to optimize data architecture across Info-Tech’s five-tier logical data architecture model.

Guided Implementation 2: Ensure You Have a Solid Data and Resources Foundation
  • Call 1: Understand the key enablers of data management as well as the required resources portfolio: people and skill sets.
  • Call 2: Determine the current state of your environment: data management enablers, people and data organizational structure, and data culture.
  • Call 3: Understand the risk and feasibility as they relate to the data strategy.

Guided Implementation 3: Formulate a Sustainable Data Strategy
  • Call 1: Determine the target state and initialize the corresponding roadmap for the data strategy.
  • Call 2: Understand the role of effective change management and communication in operationalizing the data strategy.
  • Call 3: Consolidate and refine all findings – formulate the data strategy document for senior leadership consumption.

Author

Crystal Singh

Contributors

  • Lisa Bobo, CIO, City of Rochester
  • Stephen Burt, Assistant Deputy Minister, Data, Innovation, and Analytics, and Chief Data Officer, Department of National Defence, Government of Canada
  • Dr. Irshad Siddiqui, Chief Health Information Officer (CHIO), Blessing Health System
  • Head of Enterprise Information Management at an African central bank
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