Data Strategy Tools: The Data Roadmap


I took a week off to decompress with the family. I really enjoyed the time away but when I got back I noticed that things had not stopped while I was gone. New tasks at the office waited on me, new employees were ready to on board, and new business questions were burning up in my inbox. Business moves faster than light now days so how can you keep up?

Having a plan is the first step in herding the cats into one direction. That data strategy is a great way to throw up some guard rails around the tasks that are a priority to the business. But how do we document that? And better still how do we use that documentation to make sure you are going in the right direction?

The short answer is that you need a well-defined data strategy roadmap. Now that is much easier said than done, and we will spend this week diving into how to build out that roadmap, but today I want to highlight WHY you need this roadmap.

So let us define what a data strategy roadmap is. It is a plan that outlines how an organization will collect, manage, and use data to achieve its business goals. It should be aligned with the organization's overall business strategy and should be regularly updated to reflect changes in the market and the organization's needs.

Having a data strategy roadmap can help organizations in a number of ways, including:

  • Improved decision-making: A data strategy roadmap helps organizations to make better decisions by providing them with access to the data they need to understand their customers, their market, and their own operations.
  • Increased agility: A data strategy roadmap helps organizations to be more agile by providing them with a framework for quickly and easily accessing and analyzing their data. This is essential in today's rapidly changing business environment.
  • Improved communication: A data strategy roadmap helps to improve communication between different departments within an organization. This is because it provides a common language and understanding of how data is to be used.
  • Reduced risk: A data strategy roadmap can help to reduce risk by helping organizations to identify and mitigate potential data-related problems.

One of the key benefits of having a data strategy roadmap is that it can help organizations to be more agile in moving towards their business objectives. This is because it provides a clear and concise plan for how data will be used to support the organization's goals. As those goals are achieved you will be able to see how well your road map aligns with the business. These checkpoints are a perfect time to validate assumptions and modify the roadmap once you have more stable data.

A data strategy roadmap can also help to keep channels of communication open and allow for regular checkpoints to make sure that the organization is still moving towards its business objectives. As you regularly update the roadmap to reflect changes in the market and the organization's needs you will see if your future goals still work with the business objectives. If they do not, then change them. The data strategy roadmap needs to stay aligned with the business or it will fail.

A second benefit to the business that will come out of regular checkpoints of the roadmap is that it will force the business to reflect. Maybe market conditions have changed but the business has not fully digested what that means to the organization. By stopping at a normal cadence and asking questions regarding our progress we may find that priorities have changed and we need to react to that.

Overall, having a data strategy roadmap can help organizations to be more agile in moving towards their business objectives by providing a clear plan for how data will be used to support these objectives. When you use the roadmap as a way to force the hard conversation regarding how we are doing the tool can help keep the business focused on its objectives and provide valuable feedback regarding progress towards those goals. A properly executed roadmap can be the difference between being a leader in your industry or a follower. Lets lead together as we accomplish our goals.


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