According to Forbes, “Since the day Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it has essentially been a data-driven company that just happened to do retailing. Over that quarter-century span, Bezos built perhaps the most sophisticated and successful data-powered corporation the world has ever seen.”

Data inspires ideas, reveals problems, creates revenue opportunities and shapes every facet of the organisation, whether you believe it is “an asset”, “the new oil”, “the new currency of business” or none of the above.

Research by TRUE Global Intelligence* has revealed that 55% of an organisation’s data is unquantified or untapped. The 1,300 business leaders surveyed recognize that data is key to success, now and into the future, yet very few say their organisations can successfully tap the value of all of their data. Even the respondents who have some understanding of their organisation’s untapped data agree that it remains unanalysed, unorganised and unused, in a word, useless – it is also surprising how much data people lose track of. They confessed their organisations lacked the resources, processes or skills to make it usable.

  • 81% of respondents believe data is extremely or very valuable to their organisation’s overall success.
  • 90% agree that every organisation will need to extract value from data to be successful in the future.
  • 90% agree that the smartest business leaders recognize data as a financial asset.
  • 88% agree that “the world is currently transitioning from the big data age to the age of data-driven outcomes.”
  • 56% agree that “data driven” is just a slogan in their organisation; 79% believe they must turn that slogan into reality.
  • Only 56% rate their organisation as extremely or very good at asking the right
    questions of data, even though 75% rate that skill as extremely or very important.
  • 60% say more than half of their organisation’s data is not captured, and much of it is not even understood to exist.

* Evenly split between IT and business roles, the respondents were 30 percent C-suite/owners and senior leadership (VP/SVP), 30 percent director-level, and 40 percent managers. The survey was conducted between October 2018 and January 2019 in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, Japan and Australia, in local languages.

Organisations know they must grasp the opportunities and confront the challenges of untapped data. We are saturated with data. Maybe it’s siloed off somewhere; maybe the format or metadata is inconsistent. Maybe no-one’s figured out what to do with it. Maybe you literally don’t know it exists.

The power of “big data” and increasingly sophisticated analytics tools — the revolutionary promises of machine learning and artificial intelligence — rely on our ability to combine disparate data to uncover new insights, new customer segments, new efficiencies, tougher security and whole new lines of business. Grasping these opportunities is an overwhelming endeavour, and thus, unless you start with, either:

  • your strategic imperative; or
  • a hypothesis that frames an intended innovation

the definition of success remains a moving target based on emotions and short-term glitter.

For organisations that have traversed this first challenge, the challenge to follow is implementing the change that results in an efficient capability that can be subtly enhanced as the business changes into the future. The difficulty in getting this right is there for us to observe with regards many current business intelligence solutions – where disillusionment exists due to lack of co-ordination, cohesion, ownership, agility and ultimately inefficiencies.

This plays out as:

  • Organisations that have 3,000 reports, and no knowledge of whether half of them are even useful.
  • Frustrated CDOs, tired of arguments in business meetings over data in disparate excel spreadsheets.
  • A lack of trust in the data presented in the analytics, which leads to a lack of trust in the analytics software or arguments as to the best analytics software, which leads to repeated costly projects to change applications in the exasperated hope it will resolve the issue.

At CoAcumen, we believe the solution to these struggles is to consistently put “first things first”. By using the Raykis platform, business custodians have a central hub where they can map out, discuss, challenge and refine their statement of strategic intent in a collaborative and agile way. By employing our Common Strategic Context playbook, this becomes a practice embedded in the cultural fabric of the organisation. With this foundation in place, CDOs and BICC heads are able to see the bigger picture, and align their efforts ever more closely to the strategic intent of the organisation. Because this is an ongoing, agile process, they are able to be more responsive and proactive, knowing what to say “no” to, and how to maximize their value to their business stakeholders.

“Raykis is like Jira for Chief Data Officers & their teams”