A data maturity assessment, whether delivering the new Data Maturity Assessment for Government, or utilising Oakland\u2019s own maturity assessment framework, is a great way to get a grip on your current data capabilities. It can highlight issues and create a case for change; however, it can often leave organisations wondering \u201cwhat next?\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whilst you might have identified areas of low maturity and capability gaps, you will now need to focus on defining and planning the required initiatives to drive the business forward, meet identified business needs and deliver long lasting capability. If you can\u2019t do this, your maturity assessment becomes a wasted exercise. This is where a Data Strategy comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Completing your data discovery<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A word of caution: before you jump into the \u201cDefine\u201d phase for a future data strategy, is your data discovery complete? From our experience, we see a lot of organisations focus purely on \u201cin the moment\u201d analysis of their current state, without providing key context or clarity on future vision and data capability needs for the organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contextless maturity scores are not very helpful to a non-technical audience. Have you understood the vision, aims and objectives of your organisation and the required data capability and maturity to meet these? Have you looked at future data capability and maturity needs and set realistic targets for where the organisation needs to be? Have you understood your use cases and capability needs to deliver these?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A data strategy should not be done in isolation. As we often say, it\u2019s not a strategy for data, it\u2019s data for strategy. Higher data maturity, and the required investment to deliver and sustain this, should always be outcome and value focused, driven by a real business need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Defining your data strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you\u2019ve completed your discovery work, we can start to define the strategic pillars of the data strategy. What are the 3-5 key changes or themes that define the strategy in response to the vision, objectives, and desired future state and maturity of the organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key initiatives are defined for each pillar, considering required changes across people, process, technology, and data. It\u2019s at this stage we address desired outcomes and deliverables, the associated benefits and impact on the business and in shifting your data maturity, and the resourcing and enablers for delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From here we begin to design our conceptual operating model, organisational structures, and capability deployment strategies and principles to successfully sustain the data strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n