Insights on building a data strategy to drive business value

Data executives play a critical role in setting the data strategy for an organization and putting the pieces together for their organization to become data driven, but these individuals can’t do it alone. Creating an effective data strategy requires collaboration with senior leadership to reinforce the strategy from the top down, ensuring that teams across the organization buy into the strategy and are in alignment. An organization’s leadership team also plays a critical role in fostering a strong data culture—one that thrives off leveraging data-driven insights to make business decisions and prioritizes the processes required to manage that data. While organizations need to embed a data-and-analytics focus into their talent and operating models in order to remain competitive, they also need to democratize access to data within the business itself. The ability for the right people across the organization to easily access and use data for all types of decision making is a critical aspect of a strong data culture. An effective data culture also requires investing in and supporting continuous learning. Technology—and particularly data technology and tools—is constantly changing, so providing resources for training, reskilling, and upskilling empowers employees to get the most out of their data as technology changes.-Christina Egea, Vice President, Enterprise Data Product at Capital One

The cloud provides companies with the ability to leverage data at scale. But many cloud-based companies face challenges that prevent them from fully realizing this value, including ineffective data storage methods, unorganized tech stacks, and legacy data ecosystems that limit how data is managed. To get the most out of their data, companies must reconsider how to modernize their data ecosystem and how to produce, consume, and govern data more effectively. At base level, a data ecosystem generally includes three layers: a real-time or batch publishing and streaming data platform with data capture in real time checked for completeness and quality as it is brought into the ecosystem; a cloud-based storage and warehousing infrastructure, where data is kept in its raw and complete form; and a data access layer where users can consume data from unified enterprise platforms. A modern data ecosystem provides a scalable foundation for strong data management.-Nisha Paliwal, Managing Vice President, Software Engineering at Capital One

A data ecosystem requires strong data management to ensure that data is well-governed. With more data coming from more sources, companies need to know the ins and outs of the data. Companies have to know the origin of the data, the substance of the data, the changes made to the data over time, and the people who can access the data. For good governance to be done quickly and at scale, companies should consider centralizing the policies and tools for data governance to make it easier for teams across the company to locate and access data, glean key insights, and make decisions to drive the business forward. As organizations seek to continue to take advantage of emerging technology capabilities, data will remain critical to their ability to scale, meaning that unified, company-wide platforms will be necessary to ensure data standardization and governance are embedded into core processes while ensuring data consumption remains manageable.-Adriana Bello, Managing Vice President, Product Management at Capital One

Thinking about data as a product requires obsessing over the data consumer, namely by working backward from their needs as if they were a business customer. This approach requires thinking about the problems the customer is facing or the needs they have and then possible solutions. The data consumer—business analysts, data analysts, data scientists—is no different. Moving beyond simply defining important data and instead applying product-driven thinking to data can result in more efficient and valuable data use. Clear ownership of the data is imperative, with the owner staying closely connected to the consumer and solving customer needs to enhance their experience. Ultimately, organizations can realize considerable value when data consumers are equipped to produce insights that lead to positive, impactful decisions for the business and its customers.-James Blair, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Data Product at Capital One