How To Build a Data Strategy

Companies that are committed to drawing conclusions from data gain an edge over their competitors: information from their daily activity or from external sources helps them to discover new business models or make better corporate decisions. For this reason, having a data strategy or plan is essential to know how to get the most out of data while complying with privacy and security standards.

When faced with the question of how to create a data strategy or plan, it is necessary to think about the benefits of this type of plan and its governance.

What is a Data Strategy?

A data management strategy is a corporate plan for a company to leverage the full value of its data.

To this end, the strategy should cover areas such as:

• Storage
• Access
• Updating
• Recovery (backups)
• Privacy and encryption
• Removal

In addition, the strategy must take into account the following:

• The needs of the company
• Who accesses the databases and in what role (administrator, user, etc.)
• Which technologies are involved in the data processing

Benefits of a Data Management Strategy

• Data is more productive: more people can access it in an intelligible way and interpret it.
• Helps you learn about resources, tools, and knowledge to manage data.
• It considers what to do to ensure that data is not lost or remains intact.
• Think about the future: guidelines are established for long-term access, in case equipment changes.
• Make data protection a priority, helping to avoid fines from authorities and keep customers satisfied: the security of sensitive information matters to more and more people.
• Improve data quality itself, so that there are fewer errors in analysis.

Data Governance Strategy

The data governance strategy is part of data management and serves to increase data productivity. The objective is to ‘control’ it, i.e. to know how it is produced, where it comes from, and how it is structured… In other words, this governance strategy is, in the words of the consulting firm Gartner, “an accountability framework to ensure appropriate behavior in the assessment, creation, consumption, and control of data and analytics”.

A governance strategy helps to ensure that users have better accessibility and that there is a control to avoid bad data. In this way, employees feel more confident to extract information from them.

Therefore, in order to achieve this trust, the data has to:

• Be stored and used in accordance with data protection legislation
• Be accurate
• Be complete
• Be clearly understood

How To Implement a Data-Driven Strategy in Your Company

Here are some recommendations for creating a successful data-driven strategy. The order of this example of data strategy management can vary according to the needs of each company. Some of the steps may even be omitted.

1. Ask yourself what the business objectives are and align them with the strategy. In other words, data ingestion, processing, modeling, etc. must be adapted to the company. To do this, it is necessary to establish KPIs or OKRs that link the business to its use: improve the number of customers, have more profits… An OKR can even be simply to monetize the data available to the company.
2. Raise awareness and train staff. Not only to the most technical profiles, but also to the rest of colleagues.
3. Implement the data management tool).
4. Ensure user access to data of interest to their department or tasks.
5. Stop at the ‘cleanliness’ of the data: that it is understood, that (if it is the case) it is well structured, that it complies with your model?

You too can have your own data strategy

If you want to know more about how to create a data strategy and learn how to manage it, write to us and we will help you to get the maximum business benefit from information without which the projects of many corporations are no longer understood.