Data Strategy

How your organization utilizes its data should be as unique as your business. Though most organizations collect data, they often lack the culture or technical infrastructure needed for data-driven decision-making that truly drives a high return on investment.

Define strategic ways to use your collected data that align with your business goals—and develop an implementation road map to successfully move forward—with guidance from our professionals.

Benefits of a Data-Driven Culture

Implementing a data-driven culture within your organization can help:

  • Enhance accountability, transparency, and performance
  • Incorporate efficiency and effectiveness measures and alignment with strategic goals
  • Provide performance dashboards for key stakeholders

How to Build a Data Strategy

It’s key to evaluate the critical components to achieve and maintain success in the areas most important to you in developing and implementing your data strategy: your people, processes, and systems.

Create the Strategy

  • Research Your Options. A variety of tools and applications can serve the same functions, but some are best suited for individual organizations and industries.
  • Execute on Your Plan. Once you identify opportunities, take the steps to act on them. Implementation speed is entirely dependent on the unique characteristics of your organization.

Key considerations include:

  • Prioritize opportunities that enable more opportunities. Quick wins with high visibility and impact can often positively influence stakeholders to engage deeper with a broader organizational strategy. Identify these types of initiatives to map out your critical path.
  • Establish a steering committee responsible for holding stakeholders and executors accountable to goals.
  • Integrate data into your plan by gathering data to monitor progress and enable change agility for unforeseen roadblocks.
  • Consider rewards for exceeding goals and incentives for adoption.
  • Practice what you preach. If you lead a data-driven initiative, demonstrate you’re data-driven in your approach to business by publishing your identified success measures and your progress against them.

Define Roles

Make sure your leaders and team members are aware of their responsibilities and expectations:

  • Gather input from stakeholders and end users on organizational changes that will have the most impact
  • Consider your organization structure for data-enabled resources. Is your strategic plan best served by embedding data professionals in each functional team, or centralizing your data function to serve the entire organization?
  • Determine which key roles within your data strategy are best suited to keep in-house versus contracting out

Measure Success

You must set goals and monitor them with measurable metrics. Your success is categorized by what you define and measure, and what you measure will help drive your goals.

It’s important to identify the data that’s unique to your organization such as inventories, regional impacts, as well as nuanced drivers such as seasons, weather, elections, taxes, and regulatory change. Many businesses are even created specifically as a result of regulatory change.

How to Move Forward

To move out of the nascent phases of data maturity or to expedite your current data strategy, our professionals can help you focus on key assessment areas:

  • Data culture
  • Data infrastructure
  • High-value opportunities

We’ll help you align your plan, performance, and people, and provide you with a road map that will drive communication of this essential alignment to enhance employee engagement.

Identify opportunities and assess key considerations with our guidance including:

  • How to use data to drive your growth, achieve performance, operational efficiency, and innovation and differentiation
  • How to use data to develop and sell new tools and develop capabilities to grow, achieve performance, and innovate and differentiate

Off-the-shelf implementation can lead to inefficiencies down the road. By gathering requirements and customizing tools you implement, our professionals help make strategies to work best for your organization before rolling them out.

Assess Your Current Standing

To successfully map out your data strategy, you must understand your organization’s current state through the lens of your data-driven capabilities and maturity. This step is crucial to move your strategy forward efficiently.

Your data-driven data capabilities will grow as your organization matures into a more data-driven state. These phases of maturity can be characterized across six states:

  • Lacking Data for Analytics Initiatives. An organization begins to build awareness of a strong data analytics function’s value but lacks the organizational resources to execute a data strategy.
  • Isolated Data Projects. Key business functions begin to drive independent data-driven solutions.
  • Secure, Reliable Data Repositories. Organizations begin to build and derive value from shared, reliable information and data as it becomes more of a strategic priority.
  • Governed, Self-Service Access. Toolsets are implemented to make information easier to access for nontechnical resources driving further growth in organizational data acumen.
  • Data Informs Organizational Alignment. A data analytics function stands and aligns with the strategy and operations of the business, providing insightful information to key stakeholders.
  • Insight Driven Culture. A fully data-driven organization has decision-makers and operational managers who take ownership of results of data analysis projects and thoroughly engage with data analytics to inform decisions.

Expansive Data Expertise

Working closely with your business leaders, our professionals provide a customized road map to effectively address your data challenges and implement thoughtful, pragmatic data strategies.

We guide clients of all profiles through all phases of data maturity, from early start-ups to publicly traded Fortune 100 companies.

Through our vast experience in advising clients across a range of industries, we understand the practical applications of data tools and strategies specific to your organization’s needs and business processes. 

Our membership in Praxity, AISBL—a global alliance of independent accounting firms—also keeps us connected with like-minded firms across the globe who can help provide local, international insight into all considerations of implementing data strategies.

Insights

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