What is a Data Strategy?
Data Strategy refers to an action plan on how you store, manage, and utilize the data in making business decisions. Gartner says, “ A strategy is a highly dynamic process employed to support the acquisition, organization, analysis, and delivery of data in the support of business objectives.”
Every organization will have a unique strategy as per its business goals. A complete strategy tells
- How data contributes to accomplishing organizational business goals.
- Create a timeline for completing activities, define milestones, and describe the strategy to proceed forward.
- Define how the data will benefit the organizational financial goals, and use insights to maximize the profits.
- Changes we should make to get the maximum benefit of the strategies and create a plan on how the changes are made.
Why is Data Strategy Important?
- Today, data is a valuable resource for an organization.Companies might not know what data to collect, and how to effectively store the data and convert it into a useful form. A good strategy guides the employees on how to utilize the it successfully and consistently.
- The volume of data is increasing at the quickest rate. Loads of data is being created, it becomes more challenging to manage it and access it quickly.
- With one organizational strategy, businesses can better manage data and enhance its access and usage. All the departments should work in alignment with each other.
- Different companies create data strategies in various formats.
How to Build a Data Strategy for your Ecommerce Success?
Enterprise Data Strategy
Businesses constantly generate huge volumes of data every day. Organizations can benefit from the data by creating an enterprise strategy that informs about how to use the it to solve problems by using different tools and techniques. If you are not clear about what you want, it is almost impossible to meet your final goals. A clear strategy on how to handle the huge data and utilize it for organizational benefits. Shown below are the series of steps that guide you to build an effective strategy for your business objectives.
Data Governance Strategy
The Data Governance Strategy helps you establish a definite framework for managing your data assets within the company. An efficient data governance strategy includes
- Roles of responsibilities of individuals who can access the data
- Mention the data storage and accessed.
- Create policies and regulations on the data accessibility
- Decide who can access the data based on their roles.
Data Management Strategy
Data management Plan is made after finalizing the scope for data and usage of data. The data management strategy comes with the tools and processes required to manage your data. The factors to include are:
- Define the resources necessary to manage your data like allocation of people, software, hardware, and training.
- Storage of data is identified
- Pick up the best fit options for your business.
- Define the level of security needed to protect your data.
Organizing and Storing the data
This step deals with the organization and storage of data. It tells about how share-worthy your data is. The methods of storing data may differ from one company to the other. The policies of data organization are to be mentioned in the strategy. The plan should contain how much storage capacity you need and how it is mishandled. The end goal is to make your data executable, shareable, and easily accessible to the parties in need.
Data Analytics
Analyzing the data helps businesses make decisions more scientifically and operate efficiently. The analytics strategy details the techniques of accurately analyzing the data. The data analytics plan includes:
- Explaining the preparation steps before analyzing the data.
- Mention the business rules and data models related to the data.
- Demonstrating how the data analytics will be used through a presentation.
Big Data Strategy
It is a part of the Enterprise Strategy. Data comes in many forms. It can be in structured, semi-structured, or unstructured formats and is collected from numerous sources like system logs, GPS systems, picture formats, etc. The businesses will have to verify the huge amount of data for credibility and trueness which is a challenging task for the organizations. A good big strategy explains how to utilize it to support and improve business operations. The strategy should be reliable and actionable to provide long-term success to the company.
- Collecting all kinds of data without having a purpose can cost you unnecessary money.
- An analytical plan is designed with the end goal in mind. It should include how the data add value to the business, who can use it and how they use the data etc.
- Big data is the exploration of complex and high-volume data, user-friendly and flexible tools are required to structure the data.
More planning is required to process data and accomplish your goal without being lost in the redundant numbers.
Conclusion
To conclude, you should keep in mind that it is an ongoing process. You are advised to review the plans regularly and adjust as per the business requirements. The right strategy aligns your business vision to the business strategy. In this article, we have provided a practical guide on developing a roadmap to creating a strategy. There are many other factors involved during developing the strategy. If in doubt, contact us. We help you get an actionable strategy that smoothens any friction along the process.