Business leaders are beginning to understand the importance of using data and analytics to accelerate digital business initiatives. Instead of being a secondary focus — completed by a separate team — data and analytics are shifting to a core function. However, business leaders often underestimate the complexities of data and end up missing opportunities.
Given enough eyeballs - all business is data-driven
If the data is not one of your strategic focus points written in your strategy map, it will always be in the second tier, it will stay as the second class citizen, data operations will not get the needed respect, attention organization-wide, and resources. As a result, your organization will never gain a data-driven mode of operations. Data remains the side product of operations and not the core of value creation.
Look at your organization and see if the data team is a "slave" serving other strategic projects and teams. If the answer is yes, then your organization is not putting data at the core of your business.
A key element of your strategy
As a result, you might have a data analytics team in your organization, but it is not going to have the needed resources to ignite the change; it will remain as a hobby and support function. I know it takes guts to make a decision to shift the focus, but doing little something without a proper commitment from all management including the board, the transformation is not going to succeed.
If the data is not one of your strategic focus points written in your strategy map, it will always be in the second tier, it will stay as the second class citizen, data operations will not get the needed respect, attention organization-wide, and resources
Transformation on multiple fronts
The key takeaway here is that putting data at the core of your business requires a transformation process: from application-centric to data-centric, from good-driven logic to service-dominant logic, from one-time sales to subscription business models. In some cases, your organization has already started one of the mentioned transformations, but not all.
Resources to make the journey
Taking the leap of becoming truly data-driven and creating value from data by monetizing it, is a strategic level decision. It's not something in which you just adjust a process or organization a little bit. Make the plan for the transformation, get commitment and then assign needed resources and leadership with required decision-making power and independence.
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