Integrating the Dataverse

We have spent the last month going into significant detail showing you why you need a data strategy and how to document your strategy with a roadmap.  For the next few weeks we will start using that roadmap to move your organization towards your business objectives. Our first stop will be your data governance plan.  Why is this the first place to stop?  To be honest it may not be.  There is a lot of overlap with future steps including picking the correct software, team members, and third party vendors that to help you implement the entire strategy so it does make sense to have the data governance process underway as early as possible.  The truth may not be that practical though.  Not every organization is ready to push through a true data governance plan.  And yes this will be a push.  No organization likes it when someone tells them they are doing something wrong especially if that someone is a teammate.  That is what data governance does so...

The importance of a data strategy roadmap cannot be minimized.  The fact is that one document is going to guide your work life for a very long time.  It is so important that you need to get it right, but what if you are not staffed to get into the details like you know you need to?  Maybe you do not have the in house expertise in the technology that you will be using?   Well the good news is there are 100s of companies out there that will happily take your money to help you.  Unfortunately that is also the bad news.  So with that uncertainty how do you even decide that the time is right to look outside the organization?   Let's talk about four reasons why you should hire outside help. Expertise and experience . Consultant companies have the expertise and experience to help you develop and implement a data strategy roadmap that is tailored to your specific needs. They have a deep understanding of the latest data technologies and best prac...

So the day has come.  It is time to start laying out your data strategy roadmap.  This one document is probably the most important document you will create in this entire process.  The next 2 - 5 years will be governed by this document and it will judge you constantly!  So how do we do this? Here are 10 steps to creating a data strategy roadmap. Just be cause we can list these off does not mean that you will get this all done in one day. Quite the contrary it will take time to get these accomplished. You do have to be reasonable though. Realize that some of these steps will never be done and business objectives change. Perfection is not the goal here but we do need to find the balance between "good enough" and perfect. Here we go! Investigate data sources . The first step is to identify all of the data sources that are available to the organization. This includes both internal data sources, such as customer databases and sales data, and external data sourc...

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 ho...