Data analytics is a new service in the IT world that has dominated the talk of most experts. It is a complex field that requires superb technical proficiency to have an impression on what needs done and why.
Here, we are going to give a simple overview of data strategy and how to create a reliable one for your business.
What is data strategy?
A data plan is how a business sees, controls and uses the information it has generated or has access to. Harnessing the power of data is beneficial to enterprises as loss of data may be detrimental to business growth. It is, therefore, crucial to have a data strategy in place for your business.
The world has become increasingly reliable on big data. It is, therefore, easier for data to turn from an asset into a hindrance that slows your business endeavors.
Following these following steps will help propel your business forward by facilitating the efficient collection, management and use of big data.
Step 1: Identify and Describe
The first phase in the creation of a data strategy involves showing the type of data you have and its uses. You also need to catalog your data and know how best to collect and store the data your business uses.
Another crucial factor to consider in this step is understanding the regulations that apply to your business on data collection. This will give you a headline of the data in terms of most and least importance to your business.
Step 2: Provision and Share
After describing data and cataloging it, you need to keep the data under control. This involves selecting the people who will have access to the data. This keeps competitors from stealing your data for instance. It is at this stage that data becomes classified as either confidential or open to the public.
Step 3: Stage and Store
Now, you have already found your data and the people who will have access to it. What remains is storing the data to make it accessible to the selected individuals. The main essence of this step is to choose which technology is best suited to store the data.
Often, discussions here involve complex technical language that may pass individuals outside the professional team. It is therefore advisable for people outside the technical team to ask plenty of questions to avoid confusion.
Step 4: Integrate and Move
By this point, you have identified the best technology to apply in storing and accessing the data. Now, you will need to know the movement of data through the system and the input of the latest information into the system.
This will include developing a plan that will cater to other systems that use the data from your system. The main question you need to ask at this phase is about how it will be interoperable and how future access to the data will look like.
Step 5: Govern and Manage
The last step in creating a data strategy involves governance and management. Though there is now a fuss in the IT world over governance, it is the process used to manage data on a regular basis.
It is important to manage your data as it guarantees the security of the data and availability to users. Given that each business’s needs are in constant flux, it is paramount for the regulations of access to data and type of data collected to also shift to align with these changes.
Proper governance ensures that your data meets the needs of your business and is in line with your operations over time.