Bridging the Gap Between Data Inundation and Business Value

It’s no secret that the relentless proliferation and complexity of data generated every second is changing the way you do business and how you interact with your customers. The challenge comes in figuring out how to harness the power of that data to maximize value to your organization.

It has become clear through our experiences working with organizations of all shapes and sizes that successfully bridging the gap between data inundation and business value requires a comprehensive approach grounded in the tight alignment of business strategy, data & analytics strategy, and tactical execution.

A Holistic Approach

Getting the most out of your data and achieving sustainable success as an organization requires a holistic approach. To that end, we have defined a framework that accounts for all aspects of your organization—and we mean everything: Your people, your processes, your data, and your technology. Because these are unique to every organization, every path toward actionable insights and, ultimately, business value looks different—one size does not fit all.

Narrow the Path

The speed at which you can achieve business value–that is, truly actionable insights that lead to meaningful and sustainable organizational change and positive customer impacts–is directly related to having a clear vision for your data efforts that aligns with your business strategy. What value do you want to add to your business? What specific challenge, pain point or opportunity do you want to address? High-value examples include: improving customer retention, maximizing product profitability, achieving a net  new revenue stream, improving sales performance, and countless others.

With a clear vision in mind, you can proceed with defining and implementing a tactical plan to get from data and analytics to insights and action for targeted, high-value business use cases. By focusing on a specific outcome, you will avoid the trap of wandering aimlessly down a path that is too broad to yield any immediate value.

Foster a Data-Driven Culture

In addition to clarity of vision, alignment of your people, processes, and technology to effectively and efficiently leverage your data is critical to bridging the gap. Think of culture as the default way of doing things at your organization. A successful data culture requires addressing data literacy throughout the organization; and enabling employees to make data central to their actions and decisions.

Actions Speak Louder Than Insights

While there is great satisfaction in successfully implementing technical solutions that yield “light bulb” insights, that isn’t the end of the journey to bridging the gap to business value. To achieve true business value, you must operationalize those insights to enable actions. This is the meaningful, sustainable organizational change that impacts customer experiences and enables operational improvements. These may come in the form of refining a business process, shifting customer strategy, automating an operational component, influencing a specific customer interaction, introducing a new product line, or countless other outcomes to address your vision. 

Getting the most from your data, so that you can navigate the seas of digital disruption facing your organization, can be overwhelming. But you don’t have to go it alone. The right partner will empower you to harness the full power of your data assets, maximize the value to your organization, and set you up for sustainable success.

Pero Dalkovski and Ian Foley have spent their professional careers enabling a wide array of organizations to bridge the gap between data and business value.