Data

In the past, digital transformation projects often just revolved around people, process, and technology - but in the 2020s data became the fourth pillar to digital transformation success. Data and analytics should lead to insights - confirming that you are getting the right message to the right person at the right time, building a relevant and meaningful relationship with consumers. Segmentation and targeting identifies the right people or groups to send marketing messages to. Quality data should also help drive better business decisions.

“Data sources, quality, ownership, and governance is too often neglected in the course of digital transformation,” says Tom Sloan, Solution Architecture Lead at ICP. “In addition to making data clean and consistent, many enterprises could benefit from a foundational data lake. Various technologies can then use that same data set. Most enterprises have fiefdoms of data ownership that prevent this from happening, and the lack of master data set across the ecosystem hinders automation. Building a centralized data strategy helps with system interoperability. Key to doing that is building a better and broader understanding of how different data sets can be used to empower and enrich experiences within process and applications beyond the silo it sits within today.”

Many enterprises are hiring chief data officers, or similar senior data roles, to own, champion, and drive centralized data strategies. These data programs build a master data model across the enterprise, and require people who can thrive in the deep layers of data and align details in the weeds.

In addition to the senior data officer, a data governance committee with representatives from different departments across the organization ensures that foundational data standards are maintained.

Finally, it’s important to know what your metrics are for success, and gather the baseline data to measure your success in the future. Some metrics may include:

• Is the organization getting things done more efficiently?
• Are better decisions made faster?
• Is there positive financial impact?
• Have we increased customer interactions?
• Do we have higher customer satisfaction?

ICP works closely with client teams to build unified and consistent data models, and identify the places where the data connections should happen. Working with internal data experts, we can identify the data that should be part of the master data set and craft shared models.

“We build the people and process intersections so that enterprises can align on a master data set,” adds Tom Sloan. “We help the fiefdoms understand the business case to work together rather than live in a silo. There’s a lot of change management involved: building new org structures and a comms channel, articulating how each group can help the whole digital transformation mission.”