When you’re considering building and implementing a data strategy, you should first consider three key questions…

The first question is: “why are we doing this?” Maybe you’re building out new data capability, or perhaps your data capabilities are flawed and you’re seeking to fix them. Or do you just want to use data to drive value across your organization?

The second question to consider is: “who is responsible for implementation?” Will your IT department be the responsible party? Or perhaps your Chief Data Officer or Head of Data? Maybe you wish to make it the responsibility of the entire organization?

Finally, consider the last question: “how will we know when we’re successful?” How will you know when you’ve achieved what you set out to do?

You should keep in mind your answers to these questions, as they’ll help you understand what your goals and objectives should be. You should also be aware that if you asked three different people in your organization these questions, you might well get very different answers. That’s ok but it’s why you need a strategy - to get everyone aligned.

Next, you’ll move on to think about goals and objectives. As you begin to explore how to use data to drive value across your business, your objectives will likely fall into five different areas: increases in revenue, reduction in costs, reduction in risk, increases in consumer satisfaction and increases in employee satisfaction.

There are lots of activities that you can do with data that would support each of these areas, but to help you decide on which ones are the most important for your data strategy, you first need to look at your business strategy.

Say your overall business strategy is growth - it stands to reason that your data strategy will support activities that will generate more revenue for your business. Now, that’s not to say that you couldn’t be successful in other areas too - in fact, you may well want to be! - but if you have finite resources you’ll need to prioritize your efforts and it would make sense for your data strategy to have the same priorities as your business strategy.

Developing Your Goals & Objectives

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