What are the opportunities and risks for advanced digital systems that run on data?
Developing and implementing a data strategy with supporting governance is crucial to business success. A data strategy should be designed to improve all of the ways you acquire, store, manage, share and use and create new data. It begins with identifying the business strategies enabled or the business problems data and data systems are intended to solve. It must incorporate security and privacy, data ethics, compliance demands and a means of balancing the interests of multiple internal and external stakeholders.
These considerations are fundamental - whether to enable machine learning and AI, data-first business models, data centric workflows, or, if your business is data itself.
There are six core elements of a data strategy:
(1) Identify - Identify and catalog data sources and systems - both internal and external including origin, structure and types of data; map data, data systems, and data models.
(2) Define - Define and catalog the purposes of the data sources and systems, and their use(s); determine and define linkage to business strategies and KPIs.
(3) Store - Persist data in structures and locations that supports secure, easy, appropriate shared access and processing.
(4) Provision - Package data so it can be appropriately reused and shared, and provide policies, rules for use and access, accuracy and integrity, and supporting controls.
(5) Integrate - Move and combine data residing in disparate systems, data lakes and ponds, and provide mechanisms and user tools that provide unified, consistent data views and analysis.
(6) Govern - Establish, manage, communicate and train key stakeholders on information policies, processes and mechanisms for effective data security, usage, quality, measurement, reporting and improvement of data systems and structures that support the business. (These of course include the legal and regulatory requirements appropriate to the industries and geographies in which the business operates.)
An effective, cross-functional data strategy incorporates the six elements, and typically is overseen by top level leaders given the mandate to for all elements, or through a consortium or data governance council or review board.