Your data strategy: It should be concise, actionable, and understandable by business and IT

Peter Aiken offers a more operational perspective on the use of data strategy, which is especially useful for organizations just getting started with data

Data is not just another resource. It’s your most powerful—yet most poorly managed and therefore most underutilized—organizational asset. Data is your sole nondepletable, nondegradable, durable strategic asset, and it is pervasively shared across every organizational area. Lack of talent, barriers in organizational thinking, and seven specific data sins exist as organizational prerequisites to be satisfied before (a measurable) 9 out of 10 organizations can begin to achieve the three primary goals of an organizational data strategy: improve your organization’s data, improve the way your people use data, and improve the way your people use data to achieve your organizational strategy. Peter Aiken offers a more operational perspective on the use of data strategy, which is especially useful for organizations just getting started with data. Your organizational data strategy can be used to best focus your data assets in precise support of your organization’s strategic objectives. Once past the prerequisites, organizations must develop a disciplined, repeatable means of improving the data literacy, standards, and supply as business objectives in specific areas that become the foci of subsequent data governance efforts. This process (based on the theory of constraints) is where the strategic data work really occurs, as organizations identify prioritized areas where better assets, literacy, and support (data strategy components) can help an organization better achieve specific strategic objectives. Then the process becomes lather, rinse, and repeat. Topics include: