Today I want to adress something that is very important. That is putting effort where it is effectful and really matters to the organisation.
There are three main areas I think are very important to prioritize within. Those areas are:
- Use Cases
- Data Quality
- Change management
It is really easy to say: “We need to improve data quality” or “We need to become datadriven” but in practice it is a lot harder than it sounds. Especially if you try to fix everything everywhere at the same time.
And this is why it is important to prioritize, the factors differ a bit from area to area, these are important factors I want to highlight:
Use Cases
- Use case value – what ROI is expected from the different use cases?
- Strategic value – does the use case offer the possibility to do a strategic shift?
- Organisational fairness – in order to drive a company-wide transformation we need to spread the use cases between business units. Even though the expected ROI may be higher in another area.
Data Quality
- Use case value – Exactly the same as use cases. Because data quality directly affects business throught the use cases, that is a good starting point for prioritisation. If poor data quality leads to loss of revenue then that specific data needs to be prioritised higher.
- Data complexity – Complex data is at risk of having lower data quality simply by being more complicated to visualise and having more internal dependencies.
- Regularity of use – How often is the data used? it may not drive single use cases with massive business value. But if this data object is used everywhere then it may be very important to improve the data quality.
Change Management
- Use case value – Again we return to the value generated. or in this case the potential for value because that is why we want to drive change management.
- Current data maturity – Units with high data maturity tend to be good at driving internal change. Units with lover maturity often need more support to become datadriven.
In conclusion, it is very important to prioritize effort to where it is really needed. It will never be possible to solve all problems so one important lesson is to learn what problems to fix.