Survival of the most informed: the journey to innovation starts with data

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While business transformation has always been key to staying relevant and competitive, the global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgency to accelerate innovation to keep pace with market conditions and changes in customer demand. In fact, many digitally transformed businesses have not only survived, they have thrived.

According to a 2021 McKinsey survey, the most successful companies now derive a greater share of their sales from products or services that did not exist just a year ago. These companies are developing more aggressive plans to differentiate themselves through technology, and some are gearing up to completely reinvent their value proposition.

Business insights from innovations in data, analytics, and machine learning (ML) technologies are driving this shift. As these technologies have become mainstream and the volume of data has grown exponentially, business leaders are embracing a fundamental truth: the journey to innovation begins with data, and to succeed in becoming a people-driven organization start with defining a modern data strategy and proliferating it through the corporate culture.

Define the modern data strategy roadmap

In a 2021 survey of data leadership leaders by New Vantage Partners, 92% of C-suite leaders said that organizational culture remains the biggest barrier to becoming a data-driven organization .

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A modern data strategy aims to create a culture that treats data as a strategic resource and invests in the right data infrastructure, solutions, people, processes, and tools. It engages everyone in a data-driven vision by educating teams to improve data literacy and enable top-down data-driven decision making. The strategy avoids monolithic, one-size-fits-all data structures, opting instead for data lakes and purpose-built databases and analytics engines to increase agility, easily scale and move data, and extend the use of analytics and ML across the organization.

Modern data strategies also break down structural and departmental data silos, ensuring that all the right people can access data at the right time and with the right controls, even if they are not database administration experts data or infrastructure management. An effective data strategy meets people where they are in their journey and provides tools to perform analytics and ML that match their different skill levels.

Three precepts guide the implementation of the strategy: unify data to create a single source of truth; modernize data infrastructure, analytics and ML; and innovate with the modernized environment to create new processes, customer solutions, and experiences.

Unify data

Unifying data and leveraging it across multiple data stores can give companies a complete picture and a single source of truth about their customers and business. Many companies do this by making a central data repository (or data lake) a fundamental part of their unification strategy.

Data lakes enable various roles within the...