A Data Strategy: How?

According to Bernard Marr, six are the questions that should be answered in order to develop a data strategy:

1. What do I need to know or what business problem do I need to solve?

2. What data do I need to answer my questions?

3. How will I analyse that data?

4. How will I report and present insights ?

5. What software and hardware do I need?

6. What’s the plan of action ?

1. What do I need to know or what business problem do I need to solve? This means starting with the company objectives (which are measurable, specific)/business goals that we need to achieve. For example, having more customers, identifying the best countries/cities to open a new office. 

2. What data do I need to answer my questions? It is also important to decide what kind of data would be ideal to solve our problem/to answer our question. Look inside the organisation to understand what data you already have (making an audit) and outside to establish what data you could have access to and how to collect it. Keep it small and simple.

3. How will I analyse that data? Bernard Marr believes that “Traditional data collection and analysis is one thing – like point of sale transactions, website clicks, etc. – but where much of the promise of data lies is in unstructured data, like email conversations, social media posts, video content, and so on”. The solution should be combining the structured data (typically stored in a database) with the unstructured data.

4. How will I report and present insights? Defining how insights will be communicated to the information consumer or decision maker and, after that, we should keep the target audience in mind, make use of data visualization techniques (using, for example, colors/symbols) in order to present key information in a user-friendly way).

5. What software and hardware do I need? Although Bernarr Marr presents this question separately from 2., I believe that in practice this question (5.) and question 2. could be reduced to only one question. Identifying the data needed, and making an audit of the data that our company already has, brings us to think about the means (how?). 

6. What’s the plan of action? To Bernard Marr this is the final step. To me too. Is this our final question to develop a strategy or this question should be always present in our minds since the beginning? Developing a strategy is like a continuous process of analysis, improvement and adaptation to the change. We need to identify the goals to be achieved and decide what and how to achieve them through the means. My question is… during this process, aren’t we always thinking in a plan of action, in putting our (data) strategy into practice? Maybe yes. Especially because Marr establishes that the plan of action is like a roadmap, with key milestones, participants and responsibilities, which does not conflict with my idea...