Data & Insights Strategy

Data & Insights Strategy

What is it and why is it important?

Your Data & Insights strategy is the lifeblood of the organisation, giving your people the fuel to make decisions, identify problems, uncover opportunities for future growth, develop and optimise strategies and activities, create and innovate.

There are five key challenges we run into:

  • Overwhelmed. Organisations capture too much information and don’t use it.
  • Inadequate. Organisations don’t capture enough information.
  • Short-term. There’s no long-term strategy. It’s all collected ad hoc.
  • Siloed. There’s no cross-organisational insight into what others are doing or have done which leads to duplication.
  • Fragmented. Information is not aligned across the business, so it doesn’t talk to each other or work together to build a story.

Your Data & Insights Strategy provides clarity and efficiency on the data and insights you need to drive both your operational and long-term goals. It looks at how to collect and integrate information, taking into account data privacy, security and compliance. It looks at qualitative and quantitative data and everything in between.

It can be done at an organisation level, portfolio, brand or employer brand level.

How we go about it

There are two key phases:

  1. Mapping data and insight requirements
  2. Data strategy

We work with a data technology partner to provide strategic and hands-on data and technology expertise through the first phase and leading the second phase.

Phase 1) Mapping data and insight requirements

  1. Briefing and planning
  2. Investigation and understanding
    1. Organisation structure and business model
    2. Business, brand and employer brand strategies, KPIs and activity plans
    3. Current internal/external information sources, qualitative and quantitative across 6 key areas: financial; operations, production and supply chain; data, insight, strategy, innovation and technology; brand, customer and marketing; people, culture and capability; legal, risk, compliance and security.
    4. Initial budget allocations for investing in data & insights across the 6 areas
  3. Workshop
    1. Vision: Develop a vision for data and insights in your organisation
    2. Benchmarks: Dashboard of KPIs and strategy, Strategy and activity plan information requirements across the 6 areas
    3. Gap analysis: Against the benchmarks, map current sources, issues with current source and gaps where there is no information
    4. Prioritise: which information sources are most important
  4. Strategic Roadmap
    1. Write up the strategy from the workshop
    2. Identify how to fill the gaps
    3. Develop horizon plan against priorities
    4. Cost estimates against each information source to provide an overall data & insights budget
    5. Finalise prioritisation against budget
    6. Action plan for horizon 1 against prioritised data & insights requirements

Phase 2) Data strategy

Within the context of the Strategic Roadmap, consider the data ecosystem of internal and external data across the 6 areas and how it integrates across the organisation.  

  1. Tactical goals
    1. Define specific pathways from where you are now to where you need to go
    2. Consider the requirements across the 6 areas: financial; operations, production and supply chain; data, insight, strategy, innovation and technology; brand, customer and marketing; people, culture and capability; legal, risk, compliance and security.
    3. Consider the plan from different perspectives including data systems, compliance and data security, data as an asset, organisational change, IT development, external sources, customer and employee experience and journey maps across internal/external sources

Once your organisation has the benchmarks, roadmap and tactical goals, you can then look at information architecture, mapping your data ecosystem of internal/external sources and how they integrate and identifying key compliance and data security requirements at each point.

For further insights and explanation into the Data Strategy component, please follow this link. It can be completed as a standalone scope of work and workshop.

How can we help you? 

Contact Us

Please contact us to discuss further what we can do for you. 

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