How to Align Your Data Strategy with Business Strategy
How to Align Your Data Strategy with Business Strategy
When reading about data strategy, the first comment that always comes up is that the data strategy must align with the business strategy. But what does that actually mean in practice?
The Common Pitfall
Many organizations start with technology. They buy a tool like Power BI or Snowflake and then ask, “What can we do with this?” This is backwards. A successful data strategy starts with the business questions you need to answer.
Start with Decisions
To align your data efforts, you must identify the key decisions that drive your business.
- What information would make your next board meeting more effective?
- Which operational metrics are currently “gut feel” instead of fact-based?
- Where is the bottleneck in your Order-to-Cash process?
The Loop
Data strategy is about closing the loop between data, insights, and actions. If your data architecture doesn’t support the culture of how you make decisions, the technology will fail to deliver value.
In my A-to-Z implementations, the first step is always this alignment. We define the KPIs that matter to your C-suite before we write a single line of SQL.