Why You Need a Data Strategy

June 25th, 2014

This is a great time for big data in business. There’s a widespread awareness of the value of big data analytics, and plenty of use cases that demonstrate its potential: understand your customer, optimize your supply chain, provide personalized app and media experiences.

No wonder that business leaders are asking their teams to look at big data. Anyone who’s read the business press on big data knows that the plan is simple—

    1. Get Data
    2. ???
    3. Profit!

Yet in the real world, there’s a big and unanswered question: what goes into step 2? That’s what data strategy is all about.

While it would be great for everyone if you could just “buy a Hadoop” and skip straight to “Profit!”, in reality there’s a lot of work involved, and 95% of it is unique to your business. How do you determine the steps of a big data project, and ensure it delivers results early?

Best practice suggests that successful companies have started with a pilot, and set out on a 2-3 year learning curve. But we think you can do better. Thanks to our years of data experience across diverse industries, we’ve arrived at the practice of data strategy.

Effective data strategy integrates a wide range of factors: the goals of the business and product teams, the capabilities and workflow of the analytics and engineering teams, and existing systems and data. Working through these, we can identify a roadmap of new capabilities, prioritized meaningfully. You get the benefit of focused scope with immediate return, but you can also build towards a long-term architecture.

There’s more to it, of course, which is why we’ve started an online seminar series called Keys To Data Strategy. In an interactive session, we’ll explain how data strategy works, and also take the time to consider some of your problems. We’re keeping seating limited to facilitate this attention to your needs, so head on over and reserve your place! The first seminar will be held on Thursday, 10 July.

Sign In