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Data & Analytics

How to win the game of hide and seek with an enterprise data strategy

08/10/2021

by Nate Steiner

Hide and Seek. It is a game so many children play every day and is shared across generations because of the thrilling anticipation of finding and being found.

I introduced “Hide and Seek” to my three children years ago and have played the game with them hundreds of times. As toddlers, my children found plenty of creative places to hide – behind curtains, under couches, in a clothes hamper. With time they quickly learned they were running out of places they could fit and yet remain concealed – they were getting too big and needed a new strategy. So they moved the game outdoors, added neighbors to the game, and now the game became more complex. No longer were they limited to hiding or seeking within the confines of a room, but the unbounded, great outdoors and more children to find.

And isn’t “Hide and Seek” similar to our experiences with enterprise data strategy? Early in the maturation cycle of an organization, it’s much like playing hide and seek in a house; finding the data and turning it into useful information was like me finding my child – there were only so many places he could be hiding. The data was initially difficult to uncover as you sought it out across your enterprise systems (the proverbial rooms of the house), but it was found hiding here and there.

As the enterprise matures and evolves, new business strategies are defined and we find the game (and our data) moved outdoors into more unbounded spaces and complex hiding spots – concealed in the trees, bushes and buildings of SaaS applications, cloud services, data warehouses, data lakes and the like – making the data increasingly difficult and complex to find. We know the data is out there along with the potential to unlock key business insights, but we need to adapt our strategies and processes to become better seekers.

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Key components of data and analytics strategies that enable effective seeking and finding

When it comes to enterprise data, an important part of determining your overall strategy is capturing a realistic view of the current state of the organization and understanding the vision for the future state. There are a number of key elements to assess and help paint the picture, including business alignment, people, process, and technology.

Data management processes that sustain effective seeking and finding

When it comes to enterprise data, three data management processes address the common challenges of data accessibility, ownership, quality, and consistency. All three are paramount to providing a sustainable environment for capturing key business insights:

Data Governance – Define the landscape of the game

• Sustainable data strategies rely on appropriate governance of the data (what is it, where is it, who owns it, who can access it)
• Data Governance programs can become too heavy too quickly, so take an agile approach to growing your program – prioritize, evaluate, adapt, iterate

Data Quality – Remove barriers to success

• Data Quality processes address problems like data consistency, completeness, and timeliness which are common challenges with enterprise data at scale
• A methodical approach to improving data quality relies on alignment on data definition and assessing adherence to that definition across systems
• Metrics and thresholds are defined across the different categories of data quality and help establish a baseline and drive future data quality efforts

Master Data Management and Reference Data Management – Eliminate hiding spots

• As you progress with data governance and data quality, lack of (or incomplete) Master Data and Reference Data Management processes will emerge
• Implementing or improving these processes will streamline governance (e.g., new integrated systems can “fold into” governance for respective master data) and sustain data quality (e.g., consistency, completeness, timeliness)

The challenge business leaders face today of realizing and exploiting the value of enterprise data is not new. The complexity continues to increase with the continued explosion in the volumes of data and number (and locations) of data sources involved. While hide and seek is fun to play with children, it is a frustrating way to enable a data-driven organization. Evaluating opportunities to enhance your organization’s enterprise data strategy and supporting processes can ease the frustration by accelerating the discovery of key business insights that can drive competitive advantages.

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