In our modern digital era, every company is generating significant amounts of data and this data has become a vital component in making the company run efficiently. Although everyone commonly recognizes data as a key component, there is often no strategy or product management approach in place to manage it the way you would any other asset.
What is a data strategy?
Although often considered a very heavy subject, in its simplest form a data strategy is a description of how data (and data products) will help you achieve you overall objectives and what resources are needed to do so. The steps required to define this are often some variant of the typical as-is, to-be, roadmap trio,
Understanding the current state
First you need to acquire or update your understanding of the current data ecosystem - current data products, skills and capacity, tools and technologies, processes and governance.
Understanding the desired state
The next steps involves an analysis of the data-driven objectives to identify the required effort and resources and identify dependencies. All prioritized into a backlog of epics and feature groups.
Defining the Data Roadmap
Basically the planning of the epics and feature groups on a timeline. As this is the step where the resource constraint comes into play, this is also the step where a lot of the strategic choices need to be made.
One key artefact is a set of clear guiding principles containing a set of upfront choices related to topics like the overall accountability, the operating model, the high-level architecture principles and ethics, security & compliance principles. If during the current state assessment it becomes clear these are not available, this will often be part of the data strategy exercise as well.
How we support you
Whether you wondering what data or AI could mean for your company, are just embarking on your data driven journey and would like to identify where to start, have buy-in and are looking for a business plan or are already well established but would like an outside in perspective for a strategy refresh. We'd love to help! All of the above generally involve a combination of desk-research, stakeholder interviews and interactive workshops to get the buy-in that is vital for the change management aspect.
Collaboration is key
Because we believe in the power of co-creation, it would be great of at least one member of your team works closely along with us throughout this exercise. This way we are better able to tailor everything to your organization and we are able to share knowledge, which increases the chances of sustaining the effort after the work is done.