5 Components of a Data Strategy

Businesses run on data – and the best organizations have a strong data strategy in place. We have consistent conversations with our customers about what they’re doing with their data and how they think about their data strategy. For the customers that get it right, we see 5 areas that they prioritize in terms of their strategy.

1. Identify your data. How do you source that data? What’s the structure of it? People may use a data dictionary, for example, to help identify and measure their data.

2. Provision your data. How do you share the data and make it easily available and accessible to your organization?

3. Storing the data. Once you’ve identified and provisioned it so it’s available, where does it go? Does it go into cloud storage or a relational database?

4. Integrate the data. We hear clients talk about intelligent applications and data driven decision making, and it’s something we spend a lot of time helping our customers with. This next big step is to bring that data into the world of your users, business leaders, managers and reporting.

5. Governing data. Compliance and security are big issues. You need to put policies, reporting and compliance around what you’re doing with your data to be sure you’re following both legal and geographic requirements (such as GDPR) and encryption and security compliance.

You must keep all these pieces in mind when thinking about your data strategy. First, identify the structure of your data and know what data you have, then provision and store it correctly to make it available, and of course integrate it appropriately. But on top of all that, your data must be governed and managed properly.

If you’re struggling with any of this or want to talk about how you can improve what you’re already doing, we are the people to talk to. We talk to so many of our over 7,000 customers about this and have helped get their data strategy on track—we can help you too. Click the link below to get a discussion going today. We're here to help you use your data to take your business from good to great.