Roadmap

With the growing need for data-driven operational and strategic business decision-making, companies need to adopt and execute a strategy to better manage their data and analytics by implementing capabilities that enable efficient data management and analytics delivery that drive business value across the enterprise.

Adopt a data-driven culture by implementing a framework that will oversee overall data management, analytics delivery, and data policy implementation, maximizing the business ability to create insight, and help support the overall company strategy by treating data as an enterprise asset.

Some Common Challenges:

Overall data and analytics demands are not driven by a holistic approach, resulting in rework, labor-intensive and repetitive data development, and questionable in data quality. In general, business spends 80% on data preparation, and only 20% on analysis. Business users experience difficulties navigating through data elements as well as establishing a common understanding of data characteristics. The absence of an information management foundation has resulted in acquiring too many data and BI tools making information delivery processes confusing, less than standard, and impossible to manage across the enterprise. Expansion into a multi-channel business model created an increased demand for data and analytics usage which the current infrastructure is unable to manage and scale. Master data elements span multiple systems which possess inefficiency in the business decision and increase operational and regulatory risk.

Actions to tackle these challenges:

The following actions can be taken as an approach to the resolutions:

  • Adopt a foundation that enables simplification and standardization of analytics space

  • Define and organize company-wide data elements

  • Build a baseline central data engineering function which will lead to breaking the silos across the enterprise

  • Deploy a scalable enterprise data management platform

  • Target adopting efficient data management by employing data governance

  • Establish organization, adopted processes, and deploy a platform to make data governance a success

  • Promote data-driven culture across the company

Given below is a model of the maturity of your organization’s data management and governance roadmap. Your organization needs to have a qualified data professional assess from the diagram below to see where your current state is at.

Depending on where your organization’s current state is, you need to adopt an actionable strategy that will build a baseline solution that is scalable. Your strategy should provide direction on the technical platform on which you would like to build your data repository. Depending on the business need, availability of resources, and skills, you may choose to build solutions on-premise on the cloud. Also, when deciding on going on Cloud, there may be a number of variables that can influence your decision. A solid strategy will assess your current data assets, the current presence of the stack, access to human resource and their skillsets, availability of funding, organizational priority, etc. Based on these, the strategy should be able to provide an impactful guideline and action plan in order to make your data management platform a success. One important part to ensure during the strategy adoption process is that the strategist needs to build a partnership with both business and technology subject matter experts within your business. During the strategy adoption processes, regular consultation of the SMEs will play a role in future success.

Based on our discussion earlier in this article on the “some common challenges”, if a proper strategy is adopted, the solution to these common problems should “Future Approach” similar to the table provided below: