What’s Your Data Strategy?
What’s Your Data Strategy?
Although the ability to manage torrents of data has become crucial to companies’ success, most organizations remain badly behind the curve. More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not. Data breaches are common, rogue data sets propagate in silos, and companies’ data technology often isn’t up to the demands put on it.
More than ever, the ability to manage torrents of data is critical to a company’s success. But even with the emergence of data-management functions and chief data officers (CDOs), most companies remain badly behind the curve. Cross-industry studies show that on average, less than half of an organization’s structured data is actively used in making decisions—and less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. More than 70% of employees have access to data they should not, and 80% of analysts’ time is spent simply discovering and preparing data. Data breaches are common, rogue data sets propagate in silos, and companies’ data technology often isn’t up to the demands put on it.
Having a CDO and a data-management function is a start, but neither can be fully effective in the absence of a coherent strategy for organizing, governing, analyzing, and deploying an organization’s information assets. Indeed, without such strategic management many companies struggle to protect and leverage their data—and CDOs’ tenures are often difficult and short (just 2.4 years on average, according to Gartner). In this article we describe a new framework for building a robust data strategy that can be applied across industries and levels of data maturity. The framework draws on our implementation experience at the global insurer AIG (where DalleMule is the CDO) and our study of half a dozen other large companies where its elements have been applied. The strategy enables superior data management and analytics—essential capabilities that support managerial decision making and ultimately enhance financial performance.
The “plumbing” aspects of data management may not be as sexy as the predictive models and colorful dashboards they produce, but they’re vital to high performance. As such, they’re not just the concern of the CIO and the CDO; ensuring smart data management is the responsibility of all C-suite executives, starting with the CEO.
