A data strategy is the way in which an organisation utilises data and information to support and inform both its long-term and short-term business strategies. Much like any other business strategy, a data strategy identifies your objectives before outlining the steps you should take to get there. This means a business will formulate a plan that addresses the construction of data systems and architectures as well as how their data will be collected, analysed and leveraged for the purpose of improving business outcomes in a quantifiable, measurable way.
As the name suggests, data strategy training is the process of educating a business or specific team of employees about the processes and practices that go into building a successful data strategy. Data strategy training is an important step for any business and can help you and your team discover the hallmarks of an innovative and informed data-driven culture.
At DSCallards, we offer bespoke data strategy training that will equip your business with the solutions you need to implement an informed, data-driven culture. For more information, get in touch with our team today. We would be delighted to assist you.
In order to fully establish a data culture across an organisation, a data strategy must have the following five essential elements…
Establishing a method to identify and describe data is one of the most fundamental building blocks of using data within a business. Unless the data value has a name, a defined format and a value representation, altering and processing it is not practical.
As businesses have evolved, it has become clear that storing data in a single location isn’t feasible. This is because the size of large businesses, and the diversity of modern data sources, make loading information into a single, integrated platform impractical. Your employees don’t need access to all of your company’s data – they need access to the data that will support their individual needs and tasks. This is what makes storage such an invaluable asset to your data strategy. It’s important to ensure there is a mechanism in place to store all your data in a way that is readily accessible. When stored correctly, you should only need to save your data once before giving your employees a means to find and access it.
Ensuring your data is readily accessible is no longer a specialist technical task completed by application architects and programmers. These days, businesses rely on the distribution and sharing of data to meet their operational and analytical needs. As a result, data sharing cannot be managed as a courtesy, nor can it be seen as a one-time, one-off requirement.
This is where provision is important. If your data is truly a corporate asset, then it must be packaged and prepared for collaboration. As a result, a modern data strategy must address provision as a part of daily business practices.
For obvious reasons, integration is a core component of implementing a successful data strategy. Integration should encompass all data within an organisation, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Although this is easier said than done, ensuring your business places integration at the centre of your data strategy will ensure more collaboration and consistency across your entire organisation.
As the name suggests, data governance is the process of establishing internal data policies that apply to how a business gathers, stores, processes, leverages and disposes of its data. The process also determines who can access what, as well as what kind of data a business will collect and govern.
As collaboration and usage issues continue to gain visibility, it’s important that initiatives within a business broaden in scope. As those initiatives expand, businesses must establish a set of policies, rules and methods that ensure consistent use, manipulation and management of their data.
If you’re running a business, you most likely collect data in some way shape or form – however, that data won’t assist you in optimising your organisation on its own. To do so, you’ll need a data strategy.
There are many different kinds of data strategies. A sales department of a business for example might raise concerns about the amount of fragmented data that they have about the organisation’s target audience. Integrating those different data profiles might allow the sales department to shape and inform their next campaign to their target audience, which could boost profits and improve productivity.
For assistance with your data strategy, get in touch with the team at DSCallards today. Our team provides customised data strategy training that will give your business the tools it needs to adopt a knowledgeable, data-driven culture – and we’d be delighted to assist you with your next project.