How to Develop a Big Data Strategy

By Dr. Meri Rosich, Data Science & Digital Transformation. Mentor, lecturer, STEM Ambassador Head of Data Science, Visa Consulting & Analytics AP

Dr. Meri Rosich, Data Science & Digital Transformation. Mentor, lecturer, STEM Ambassador Head of Data Science, Visa Consulting & Analytics AP

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine." - Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner Research.

As a business leader in the modern age, you are required to make data-driven strategic decisions every day. Your organization needs to leverage data to learn about your customers and build a sustainable competitive advantage. It has become vital for business leaders to have the skills to lead the digital transformation in the organization, creating the capabilities and systems to support a data-driven culture.

Organizations can empower their teams to make analytics-based workplace decisions with real-time, actionable insights that give them full business visibility. Employees must become competent data-driven project leaders who can identify problems worth solving with data; gain leadership support and team buy-in and work with external experts to achieve business objectives.

In order to maximize the competitive advantages from data, leaders should understand the technology industry environment and how to extract competitive advantage, the concepts and strategy of corporate of technology management, the leadership challenges and driving teams to ensure future success, and the project management challenges across cross-cultural, technological and operational capabilities.

The strategic technology industry environment

Companies have used data for decades to inform strategic decisions and refine business processes. The origin of the “Information Society” was born in the 1800s due to the need for control during the steam revolution.

Today, big data ultimately refers to data that would typically be too expensive to store, manage, and analyze using traditional database systems. Because of the Industry 4.0 trends of automation and data exchange, rapid changes are an unavoidable source of transformation in every industry.

Leaders should start by looking at their industry peers and examine how technology is creating new competitive advantages from data. They need to identify their competitor’s new business models and examine their own core competencies and explore the opportunities of digital business in a global context.

A leader is only as good as their team, and during digital transformations it is more important than ever to have the best talent you can find

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, manages his company with a very long term view. That allows his organization to set the pillars for digital transformation years in advance, and not just prevent the impact of technological changes but leverage them to its full advantage.

The big data organizational transformation

Digital transformation requires change management, and for most organizations, the process of change management is complex.

Leaders must develop a deep assessment of the corporate strategy and balance corporate initiatives with the interests of different business units. The incentives must be aligned to change, to avoid leadership taking long term views and fostering change, and managers resisting change due to lack of incentive alignment and organizational clarity.

There are two main data strategy organizational structures that can support business transformation. Outward-focused companies grow around products and over time develop data-driven matrixed organizations that promote technical and strategic meritocracy. Inward-focused organizations tend to isolate data innovation in centers of excellence and analytics departments that evolve from backend production departments, and drive organizational change with transformational solutions. Both can be effective and successful as long as they are flexible enough to evolve with organizational needs.

The team leadership challenges

A leader is only as good as their team, and during digital transformations it is more important than ever to have the best talent you can find, and set a clear call to action.

The organizational requirements to succeed in big data are:

● Mission: strong focus and governance structure

● Talent: a critical mass of specialists and generalists data scientists

● Infrastructure: to obtain, create and manage the data

● Knowledge: to deploy statistical and data-mining models

Some management teams adopt a learning strategy around data, driven by long term view of a changing landscape, and the need to stay ahead of competitors. Others are compliance-driven, reactive, and implement changes only under economic pressure that force the organization to change. Consider for a moment which one is yours.

The data strategy execution excellence

Developing and implementing a digital transformation strategy requires not just organizational alignment and the right team to execute, but also the ability to drive project management challenges across cross-cultural, technological and operational capabilities.

To conclude, if your company is thinking about leveraging big data in their strategy, you may start by analyzing the company’s strategic plan, map the use of technology solutions and the data generated, shared and received during the whole value chain. Then, identify three future strategic priorities that can be driven by data and think about how are you going to implement them, how are they going to impact your employees, customers and the society in the future, as well as what results can you expect in the short and long term. And finally, design your organization’s digital transformation around business goals, make data and analytics a top priority and take an enterprise-wide approach.