Unleashing business success through data

Approaches used to achieve business strategy outcomes through a focused data strategy and by creating high performing data teams

Key Take-aways

• Aligning data strategies tightly with specific business objectives is crucial for achieving meaningful outcomes.
• Poor data strategies often lack clear goals, fail to engage data teams effectively, and neglect the importance of a strong data culture.
• Including a Head of Data & Analytics in the executive team ensures data insights are closely connected to business needs.
• Effective data strategies should provide insights at strategic, tactical, operational, and compliance levels.
• Building a data-driven culture requires fostering collaboration, trust, governance, and transparency in data practices.

Poorly designed data strategies are destined to fail

In today’s data-driven business landscape, the role of data strategy and the subsequent activity of your data teams cannot be overstated. Organisations across Australia invest significant resources in crafting and implementing data strategies, deploying new data solutions, and investing in data teams to harness the power of their data for growth and operational efficiency.

Despite these efforts, many organisations find themselves falling short of their expectations in terms of realising the full potential of their data insights to drive organisational improvements.

Why do data strategies and activities of data teams sometimes fail?

Behind this shortfall lies the failure to effectively align the data strategy (and the subsequent team activity behind it) with the outcomes sought from the business strategy.

Albeit inconsistently, many organisations establish clean data sets, adopt cloud storage solutions, and implement advanced visualisation tools and AI applications.  However, once deployed, don’t receive the transformative insights that drive decision making and the operational enhancements they needed.

Organisations as a result relegate the investment into data as an ‘infrastructure issue’, where it continues to yield limited to no returns in terms of tangible business outcomes. This devalues the true power of what organisations can achieve from a business outcomes focused data strategy and a high performing data team that serves the organisation well.

So, why do so many organisations struggle to align their data strategy and activities with their business outcomes effectively?

The answer lies in the lack of a laser-like focus on targeted outcomes within the business strategy. A well-crafted data strategy, and a high performing data team must be very tightly aligned with specific business objectives, leaving no room for ambiguity. Each element in the data strategy, from its overarching vision to its enabling actions, should directly contribute to realising one or more business strategy outcomes.

Business leaders don’t fully realise what’s in it for them

Identifying the shortcomings of a poorly designed data strategy is crucial for organisations looking to recalibrate their approach.

Business leaders don’t fully realise what’s in it for them

Align fully to established business strategy outcomes

Though this sounds in principle fairly straightforward, the discipline here is to ensure that all activities in the Data Strategic Plan have a direct line to at least one Business Strategy Objective or Outcome.

• Clear vision of how data-driven insight supports the business strategy.
• Clarity on bridging the gap from ‘data provision and analysis’ to ‘insight provision’.
• Designs for the various data assets and support structures needed to deploy.
• A set of activities that show all parties how to become insight-driven across the organisation (not just in the data team).

Elevate the role of data leadership

By integrating the Head of Data & Analytics into the executive team, organisations can ensure that data insights are deeply rooted in business needs and challenges.

• They can deeply understand the business needs and challenges (at all levels, but initially at Exec level).
• Provide insights that inform fellow Executives how to address those needs and challenges.
• Provide their own insight-driven recommendations to fellow Executives based on their analysis (observed in more data mature organisations).
• Be the point person on enterprise-wide and urgent organisational challenges that need strategic level insights.

For this role to be successful the Head of Data & Analytics needs a data team with capabilities in advisory data interpretation, and data visualisation.

Address full intelligence hierarchy

Have a plan to provide data driven insights across four levels, including:

• Strategic Insights: That drive long term decisions and have enterprise-wide implications. (~10% of focus)
• Tactical Insights: That drive medium term decisions and have wide reaching, but not enterprise-wide, implications. (~25% of focus)
• Operational Insights: The drive day-to-day decisions and have business function or unit implications. (~50% of focus)
• Compliance reporting: Mandatory reporting needs only e.g. Government Statutory reporting. (~10% of focus)

In practice, organisations will not build a data strategy around this idea on its own, and instead use this frame to ensure outputs are as comprehensive as they should be (i.e., have they addressed how to service all levels sufficiently?)

Effective data teams empower business strategy

Collaborate on the business’s questions

Data analysts should focus on answering the priority questions of decision-makers, with a continuous improvement cycle in place to refine insights provision (i.e. retesting the questions, or how well the team provide insights)

Here, frameworks like SPP’s “Question-First” comes into play – to help business leaders effectively collaborate with data teams. It enables these decision-makers to identify key questions within their area, and to work with data teams to prioritise them based on business value and analytical capability. Data teams can then implement processes to balance automation with human interpretation, and identify data sources that are critical as single sources of trust.

This process helps to:

• Know how parties across the organisation will collaborate to conduct analysis.
• Clarify what activities and resources need to be re-balanced to automate insight provision.
• Establish which data needs a ‘single source of trust¹‘ in the organisation (e.g., most commonly needed data source across multiple decision-makers).

Build a data-driven decision making culture

Promoting collaboration, increasing trust in data capabilities, driving data governance, defining standards for good insight provision, and fostering transparency are all essential elements of building a data-driven culture within organisations.

Organisation needs to:

• Promote collaboration, actively break siloed mentality via a mandate from senior leadership, or establishing common principles to work towards (e.g., F.A.I.R.).
• Increase trust in the data and insight capabilities, demonstrated through stewardship of a data strategy that is endorsed by leadership and delivers quick wins.
• Drive data governance, focused initially on data quality of priority analytical needs, with common standards and models to work to.
• Define what good looks like, collaboratively invite your data community to discuss and understand what good insight provision looks like, and upskill the analytics team on data interpretation and communication of insights.
• Foster transparency, provide a platform for various parties in your organisation to understand what each other are working on, so that you can learn from each other and enable scale of analysis.

Final Thoughts

The effectiveness of data strategy and data teams lies in their technical aspects and in their alignment with the broader business strategy. Organisations must strive to bridge the gap between data and business objectives by refining their data strategies and enabling their data teams to have a laser like focus on targeted business outcomes. By doing so, they can unlock the full potential of their data assets and drive tangible business success.

If you’d like to delve deeper into this topic or discuss how to implement these strategies within your organisation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to SPP for a conversation.