Decisively Digital

Chapter 17Data Strategy as an Essential Component of the Digital Transformation Journey

According to Forrester, between 60 percent and 73 percent of all data within an organization goes unused for analytics.¹ Nearly 30 percent of the so-called global datasphere will be real-time information by 2025, IDC says.²

This real-life example is based on an engagement at a telecommunications company (telco). The telco wanted to better understand its customers' usage patterns (mobile, landline, internet services, various bundles) and network performance to assess potential new products and other bundle configurations. However, the telco was unable to get a complete picture of its data. It was nearly impossible to access the highly decentralized data for ad hoc analysis and machine learning. So, employees downloaded data manually and processed it on desktop machines, which led to many limitations in quality and quantity and made governance challenging.

Three Elements of a Data Strategy

The telco's goal is to manage data as a corporate asset. A data strategy was required to leverage all their data. This data strategy was meant to embrace various isolated and sometimes redundant big data initiatives and analytics practices that were not well orchestrated in the past.

The telco's data strategy (see Figure 17.1) has these three core elements:

• Big data
• Analytics
• Decision-support tools

Strongly aligning these three core elements as part of the data strategy should drastically increase the ...