Step 3 in how to become a Data Driven Business

Getting the data foundations right is absolutely critical to your journey to becoming a Data Driven Business, however, probably even more importantly, do you know whether your business is truly aligned with your value chain, i.e. how well matched are your strategies, organisational capabilities, resources, and management systems to support the enterprise’s purpose. If not, then anything else you do to convert your business to one driven by data, you will end up either wasting a lot of effort, or, if lucky, deliver only a small percentage of the potential.

In my previous blogs around this topic I pushed hard on the need to leverage the asset you already own – your historical data. I stand by this as a great starting point, however, recent projects experiences here at Elemental Concept have also opened up the need to often integrate 3rd party data to enhance your own sources, filling in gaps and adding perspectives that your own data maybe doesn’t cover. Great examples of these include using 3rd party data to challenge assumptions developed by looking inwards only, identify market opportunities missed, just because you’ve never measured yourself against competitors, or to predict customer churn to allow your account teams to intervene before it’s too late. A great example again from a recent customer, was to re-target marketing spend at under-serviced geographic markets, rather than wasting it on competitor saturated geographies.

Sadly, when you get to the end of the first implementation, all you are doing is starting the next, as you need to feed and tweak the data model continuously to keep pace with business changes, competitive threats and, god forbid, global pandemics, get it right though and at least you’ll be able to pivot your offering based on analytics rather than a hunch. That’s got to be the way forward hasn’t it?

Use this Risk Scorecard to review where you are with a core building block for AI, find out whether you’re looking good, or have some work to do to get started