Data Strategy
As your business grows the complexity of decision making grows, this can be overwhelming. When you were close to the coal face, dealing directly with customers every day, you knew what was happening, you had direct relationships with every member of your team, and anytime you looked at data it just served to re-enforce your gut decision.
Designing an effective strategy to leverage the data in your business is important to ensure that:
- As you become more removed from the direct operations you have the tools in place to be across what is happening.
- As your business becomes more complex through broader products, a larger customer base, or simply more team members involved in the system, you retain an ability to understand what is happening.
- As you acquire data in more systems you have an ability to pull it all together to a single pane of glass.
- As the market context shifts and changes your gut and reliance on heuristics doesn’t get exposed as no longer being relevant.
At it’s core our data strategy work asks the question,
What decisions do you need to make now and into the future, and do you have the right data available to make them effectively?
The process we undertake begins with the decision makers, understanding what they are trying to understand and on what cadence, is it a decision made daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly?
At the same time we are looking at where your data is being held, with particular focus on how clean and accessible it is.
From here we can understand where there are gaps in the data you have available to you and how easy it is to get that data into the hands of the decision makers.
We know from experience that utilising data in the business is a journey, our focus is on designing a strategy that is cognisant of:
- The lead time of data; identifying you need to a piece of data that doesn’t exist means either investing to create it retrospectively or accepting a delay while you create a significant enough volume.Merely having data available doesn’t mean it will be used, there is a change initiative that needs to be considered to ensure adoption of data into decisions, often aided by some quick wins.
- As engagement increases so scope expands as the potential becomes apparent to more members of your organisation, locking in on a single reporting framework and automating it too early can lead to significant rework.
Our focus on the journey often results in being able to utilise the existing reporting infrastructure whilst the focus is on consistency of reporting and engagement in the data. From there we can mature the organisations analytics in line with its ability to gain benefits from the investment, either through improved decisions, or reduced reporting costs.
We make switching Easy!
Changing IT companies or systems can be a hassle. We’ll support you through the process, liaising with your existing IT partner and helping you source everything we need to hit the ground running.
