Unlock your competitive advantage with accessible and trusted data foundations and governance

Plainly and simply, there is no advantage to be had if there is no trust or understanding of the data you’re putting out as an organisation. This goes as much for the customers who rely on your data to make decisions as it does for the staff who use it to make products with a Data-as-a-Product mindset. You’ve heard the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Without a solid, trusted data foundation, you risk building data products that are difficult to maintain and won’t scale with your business.

Every data user, regardless of their end goal, must be able to trust its quality, accuracy and sources. For example, if cracks in your foundations cause stock shortages due to inaccurate forecasting predictions, you can probably assume you’ve failed to meet your customers’ expectations and put yourself at risk of not seeing them again.

In commercial terms, the potential losses in revenue are obvious. Customers who are served outdated personalised information about a product they want will likely go elsewhere to buy it. In emotional terms, previously established relationships and, indeed, brand reputations are at real risk if flawed data is relied upon in this way. In operational terms, bad data exposes you to all sorts of inefficiencies as an organisation, from duplicated processes to wasted resources on data products that don’t work. It’s easy to see how the costs of untrustworthy, unmanaged data can spiral out of control.

That’s why it’s crucial to get your approach to data governance right from the very beginning. As you start to build your architecture, capture and store common code patterns, cloud deployments and other integrations in software libraries and interfaces that anyone can access. Create governance structures and assign responsibilities to help you manage your data and avoid a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario. Ensure that the information you store is kept accurate, up-to-date and appropriate for the decision-making it drives at all times. 

All of this means you’ll have the kinds of data sets your users can trust and, crucially, the blueprints for a scalable data foundation drawn up from the start. Better still, it will make sure your data is traceable with fully explainable outcomes, which will help and not hamper your organisation’s reputation as you grow.

This takes a combination of timely digital transformation and shrewd human insight to know where investments need to be made to set your organisation up for success. Choosing the right technology and empowering the right people are critical elements of such growth, but try not to run before you can walk. Think big, but start small and prove the value first to maximise your chances of leadership buy-in.

When it comes to investing in your data foundations, understanding where the value will come from and when is seldom straightforward. The data maturity journey can be a long one, but it can accelerate growth, innovation and profitability if you get your strategy right.

You might eventually be using AI and ML to provide your customers with more timely product or service recommendations, improving your commercial success. You might increasingly be saving time on previously manual data collection tasks for forecasting or reporting, improving your operational success. More robust and efficient data foundations and governance policies can and most likely will affect your business in a range of ways, some of which you won’t have envisaged at the onset of your strategy. 

The key is to focus not on inputs or outputs, but on the aforementioned outcomes for customers and employees alike. In agriculture, for example, farmers strive to improve yield during every crop cycle. If they have data and insights that drastically reduce their estimation times at their fingertips, they can do exactly that and measure the real-world value that stronger data foundations can bring them. In retail, buyers of used cars want up-to-the-minute stock availability and prompt delivery. If the teams aren’t restricted by slow processes, repetitive tasks and internal bottlenecks, they can process the data they need to serve such customers much more quickly and efficiently. These outcomes demonstrate the tangible value that data maturity can deliver for an organisation if the problem areas are diagnosed correctly in the first place and effectively governed thereafter.

Data investments come in many shapes and sizes and can look different from one organisation to the next. If you’ve identified a need for improving the accessibility, trustworthiness and quality of data at your organisation, but you’re not sure how to execute it, our data experts are here to help. 

We build data foundations and data governance strategies that enable smarter decision-making for businesses in a range of industries and we’d love to do the same for you. Get in touch today to find out more.