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The past decade has demonstrated that the companies most effective at harnessing data are the most successful. With new technologies increasing the potential usefulness of data, increasing the companies data maturity could be the difference between thriving and extinction.
Our research discovered that companies today use less than two thirds of their data brain. Below you'll find ten practical steps to help you make more use of your data and get your business to stand out.
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Understanding where you sit on a data maturity scale gives you a baseline to establish your needs and goals, and objectively measure your progress. Often, businesses think they are further along than they are, and having an external assessment brings clarity to the picture and exposes where action is needed.
70% of cloud migrations fail, so it’s important to be strategic and selective and move in stages. Decide which data sources will be most pertinent to move first, focusing on ones that will enable quick wins with minimal disruptions. This way, as you progress on your journey, you can ensure you are continuously delivering value.
Just because something is complex, doesn’t mean it has to be more difficult or costly to manage. Automation of data insights helps to remove repetitive tasks, enabling more time for analysis and insights. Moreover, common tooling, low code, and no code make it easier to manage data, and cloud computing and tooling allow you to achieve economies of scale.
Moving and storing data takes energy. Yet businesses often forget about these costs, particularly when using cloud storage. Storing data unnecessarily also creates risk; many regulations, such as GDPR, now demand that data must be deleted within a certain timeframe. By setting and automating policies to ensure data is deleted promptly, you can reduce your costs and risks.
Legacy technology is a persistent challenge. Yet moving away from legacy systems is not always possible and comes with risk. By decoupling systems, you can reduce your dependencies and modernise in stages. For instance, changing a system’s front end to improve customer experience first before embarking on a back-end systems upgrade. This reduces risk while still enabling steady modernisation.
“Henry Ford once remarked that if you ask people what they want, they will ask for faster horses. The same is often true for technology. We seek tools that incrementally improve on what we are already doing – but real progress comes through transformation. It’s important to remain curious, consider what is possible, and look for new tools that will drive the business forward instead of just enabling you to tread water.”
- Matt Penton, Head of Data, Analytics & AI at Qodea
When modernising, it’s important to consider downstream consumers and upstream suppliers of data to reimagine business processes holistically. Simply swapping old tech for new will not get you where you want to be. You need to change the policies and workflows, too. For instance, if you input a new automated system for invoicing but still require human approval, the process will not operate notably faster than what existed previously.
Not all data is created equal. By grading your data as gold, silver or bronze, you can set governance around how that data is used. For instance, anything used for compliance reporting must be gold. You can then plan to migrate your data sources up the chain, moving your silvers to gold and your bronzes to silver, helping you to continually raise the quality bar in a prioritised, manageable way.
Data pipelines frequently break. Moving data from one place to another inevitably hits roadblocks. Overcoming this data friction means being able to recover, find the fault, and fix it fast. To do this, you need deep visibility into all data pipelines and interdependencies so data flow can be restored seamlessly.
Having more competent data citizens in your organisation will help you unlock the full capacity of your data brain. However, that doesn’t mean you must train everyone to be an SQL analyst. Today’s training comes in all different flavours, lowering many of the previous barriers to entry, enabling rapid access to new understanding, techniques, insights and tooling.
To unleash the innovative potential of data, end-users need to be able to experiment. Creating safe environments built in highly secure sandboxes and development areas gives people that space to create. With clear, robust guardrails that govern how and where data can be used, you can open more data up to more people all the while mitigating risk.
The human brain is a marvel of evolutionary engineering. Its ability to store, receive, process, and send millions of sensory signals and data throughout the body - activating our muscles and driving us to action - is key to who we are.
The brain contains millions of synapses that connect and communicate between neurons across the body. These synapses can be created dynamically, removed and optimised to deliver and retrieve information at the fastest speed possible - helping us to create memories, insights and understanding.
A large part of the brain’s brilliance is synthesising lots of different data, foregrounding what’s relevant, and turning it into actionable information that is useful, timely and contextual.
Similarly, many businesses and organisations might be said to have data brains at their centre. An effective data brain is not just a storage repository for raw data. Instead, the most sophisticated data brains use information intelligently. They integrate a complex web of signals, sources, live contexts, and analytics tools to correlate and synthesise data into useful, actionable information that drives an organisation’s success.
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