Rewired

Chapter 24Determine what data matters

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

—Sherlock Holmes

A data strategy defines what data you need and how to make it ready to deliver on your business priorities. The output is a plan to clean that data and make it easily accessible.

Identifying and prioritizing data

Start by identifying the data needed to deliver on the digital solutions and underlying use cases prescribed in the digital roadmap. The roadmap will often identify data needs at a high level, but those have to be translated into specific data needs.

Defining key terms

• Data element: Basic unit of information that has a unique meaning, e.g., customer name, customer address, product name, date.
• Data domain: Conceptual grouping of related data, often used to organize both data governance efforts and data architecture.
• Data product: A high-quality, ready-to-use set of data that people across an organization can easily access and use. It is usually a subset of a data domain.

In almost every case, you'll find you have more data than you need to get started. Prioritize data domains based on their importance to the business in enabling the digital roadmap, as well as other considerations such as risk and regulatory requirements.

This prioritization exercise should also extend to the data elements within each data domain to identify what matters most. For example, within the customer data domain, there may be hundreds or thousands of data elements like ...