If you want to understand the pattern and characteristics hidden within your data and use it to make informed decisions, you need a data strategy.
The average company analyses just 40% of its data – and when it comes to unstructured data, this figure drops to less than 1%. So, what’s going on? Well, the fact is that most data wastage is down to businesses not having a data strategy roadmap in place to ensure their data is used effectively.
However, at a time when 90% of businesses are increasing their investments in data and analytics, it’s never been more important to have a data strategy roadmap to make sure you get the most out of your insights.
What is a data strategy roadmap?
A data strategy roadmap is a plan that enables you to turn your insights into action. Basically, if you want to use your data to get to grips with your customers’ behaviour, understand what drives their decisions, and find ways to learn from it, you need a data strategy roadmap.
Your data strategy roadmap should be developed based on your overall vision and objectives for your business and is built to provide guidance on how your businesses will acquire, secure, store, monitor, and analyse your data so you can use it to its fullest potential.
Your roadmap will help you to:
- Clearly define your data objectives and goals
- Understand your current data landscape
- Identify areas for improvement
- Continuously monitor and measure performance
- Improve your decision-making process
- Increase efficiency and productivity
- Gain a competitive edge
Think of it like any journey: if you don’t have a clear idea of where you’re going and how you’re planning to get there, it will be almost impossible to reach your destination. Ready to get started on your data journey? Let’s go!
5 steps to building a data strategy roadmap
1. Create a plan and align your vision
First things first, if your data strategy roadmap is going to drive business growth, you need to make sure your data strategy aligns with your business vision and goals and figure out where it fits into the big picture.
Start by looking at where your business is now versus where you want to be in the future. How are you going to get there? What are the objectives that matter most? What are you currently succeeding at? Or struggling with?
It’s about articulating the ‘why’, and whatever your overall aim is, whether it’s to increase revenue, boost efficiency, or improve customer satisfaction, your data needs to be the driving force behind it.
By identifying the gaps in your current data strategy and figuring out how to plug those gaps, you can clarify key goals and objectives and determine what your data roadmap needs to get you where you want to be.
2. Understand the state of your insights
Next, you need to go deeper into your data and conduct a data audit to make sure you can count on it. 50% of CTOs don’t trust their data – but if you’re going to use your data to grow your business, you need to make a change.
Basically, if your data is bad, your data strategy is going to fail. A data audit enables you to bring all your data together for a single data view so you can understand the state of your insights, identify any gaps that exist, ensure your data is clean and accurate, enhance it, and then apply it.
And that’s not all: once your data has been audited, you also need to ensure that you continue to keep the standards high for accurate reporting. Clean data that meets the necessary standards ensures you can keep information up to date and ensure your data is as relevant as possible.
3. Build a data governance framework
A data governance framework is another essential component of your data strategy roadmap. It’s a set of policies and processes that controls how you manage your data to ensure consistency, accuracy, and security.
A comprehensive data governance framework is essential for maintaining the integrity of your data and managing your data assets. It should include everything from defining roles and responsibilities to determining where the data resides and creating procedures and tools for accessing and using it.
This framework is vital if your data is going to be handled properly. Plus, as your business continues to grow, the volume of data you’ll be dealing with will increase too, which is why it’s so important that your data is secure, compliant, and managed according to GDPR rules.
4. Use data to inform your decisions
So, your data is clean and accurate, you’ve got a data governance framework in place, and you’ve got the necessary procedures to access and use it. Next, it’s time to move on to the good stuff: how you’re going to use your data to support decision making and streamline your path to value.
With a data analytics plan, you can determine what techniques you are going to use to analyse and interpret your data. Here at Edit, for example, our data wizards use a combination of profiling and segmentation, attribution modelling, predictive models, and market sizing and sensing to help our clients get the most out of their data and inform their decisions.
What’s more, we also hypothesise, test, and rebuild through A/B testing, user feedback, competitor benchmarking, causal impact analysis, and design and development consultation, enabling our clients to unlock the insights they need to drive business growth.
5. Revise your roadmap regularly
Finally, it’s important to remember that your data strategy roadmap isn’t a static document. You need to review and revise it regularly to ensure it remains aligned to your business objectives.
If your data is going to successfully inform your decisions, you need to remain as agile and adaptable as possible – hence the need to review your roadmap, monitor the effectiveness of your strategy, and make any necessary amends.
This is where the first step of your data strategy roadmap comes into play. Reviewing the KPIs and measuring the key analytics determined at the beginning of your roadmap means you can gauge the success of your data strategy and see what’s working and what isn’t.
How Edit can help you perfect your data strategy roadmap
If you need help putting together a data strategy roadmap, you’ve come to the right place. When you partner with Edit, our team of experts will put together a bespoke, end-to-end solution that is completely tailored to your needs.
Whether you need a long-term data plan or an overflow resource, we’ll support you wherever you are in your data journey by bringing together data science, data management, data strategy, and clever analytics to help you on your path to growth.
So, if you’d like to find out more about how we can help you access brand-changing insights and get the most out of your data, contact us today to learn more.
