Beginning the journey – First steps in becoming data driven

Whilst there is a huge opportunity for every organisation to become “driven by data” it can be daunting to start. Even worse, shaking the belief that creating a perfect data strategy and a lengthy IT driven rollout plan is the way forward is a culture shift that can paralyse progress. However every journey starts with the first step and for most organisations those first steps can be both simple and deliver impactful business value.

To get started we should forget agonising over whether to use Azure, AWS or GCP (you can do everything you want with any), and root a data strategy in business objectives and how data can improve value generation. Technology can always be changed, but value capture opportunity missed can never be recaptured.

A framework for assessing opportunity

If you are at the other end of the spectrum and you are full of ideas but don’t know which to choose an easy solution is to adopt a classic Impact/ Ease matrix. Put simply, to help prioritise which potential projects will realise the maximum outcome with the minimum effort. Of course unless you have experience of developing automation, AI or other data solutions it can be hard to understand this and of course this is where we can help.

But don’t forget the foundations

Whilst we have a firm belief that learning by doing and iterative development is the key to developing a data driven culture it’s not to say that you shouldn’t run that transformative data infrastructure project at the same time. The learnings you take from experimentation will only enrich your transformation strategy and by rooting it in ongoing learnings, rather than waiting for this to complete before starting to activate your data driven approaches.

As well as helping you to create the ideas and assess the opportunitities we would be delighted to both develop solutions for you alongside helping you define the longer term data strategy.