A Series on Data Excellence

By Deepa Salem, Vice President and Research Director, SAPInsider “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – a quote commonly attributed to Peter Drucker, the management expert. This fact rings true today in the realm of enterprise data analytics strategy. Without a data culture that catalyzes the strategy and brings it to life, any strategy is just wishful thinking and becomes a severe waste of scarce IT funds. In our new SAPInsider benchmark research of 213 members on Data Management and Data Warehousing on the Cloud, released October 2021, we found that a good 42% of respondents were partially, slightly, or not satisfied with how their enterprise data strategy was meeting their business requirements. Was this a result of a flawed strategy itself or poor execution and adoption of the strategy? Conversations with our members clearly show that organizational culture drives both the formulation of the right enterprise data strategy and its adoption. This is further confirmed by a Big Data and AI Executive Survey of C-Suite executives from 85 large companies by NewVantage Partners, in which only 24.4% claimed to have forged a data culture. NewVantage Partners reports the following in their research summary in the Harvard Business Review:“for the fifth consecutive year, executives report that cultural challenges — not technological ones — represent the biggest impediment around data initiatives.” Unfortunately, building such a data culture is often not a tangible project that can be delivered in a short timeframe. Culture often has in-built inertia – change of culture is slow, uneven, and messy. Ideally, this culture is created by expectation setting, role modeling, and constant communication by executives. Senior leaders set the expectation that decision-making will be done only with exhaustive data to back them up. Yet, this expectation needs to trickle down through the ranks as a positive force for good and not a painful mandate. Once that happens, it becomes the norm. A data architect from a leading healthcare company in the U.S. captures its data culture, “Not bringing relevant data to meetings is considered a matter of shame”. However, if a data culture is missing or lacking, can IT play a role in catalyzing and nurturing it? It is very possible for IT leaders to drive or nurture a culture with best practices, based on what we hear from our members. CIOs, in collaboration with a chief digital officer (CDO) or a chief transformation officer (CTO), can proactively paint the vision of what data can achieve for the organization in the realm of digital transformation, competitive differentiation, and innovation. This can include visionary thinking of not only incremental performance improvements, but also the possibilities of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. IT and data architects can establish collaborative councils with business users from various functions and regions to develop potent use cases that extract value from data. Such a collaborative, disciplined process can lead to increased adoption of the data analytics while delivering value from the enterprise data strategy and analytics investments. CIO and senior data architects can develop and communicate an enterprise data strategy with a pragmatic roadmap that will deliver value as well as be nimble to course-correct and adapt to business needs. Business users have a vital role in this process for it to be impactful in adoption and value. Setting up metrics to measure the success of the strategy is critical. For example, SAPInsider’s recent benchmark report, Data Management and Data Warehousing on the Cloud, found that companies used metrics such as faster access to data (58%), data integrity (57%), and visibility and insight (56%) to measure the success of their data strategy. Data is a valuable raw material for success. Just as a certain product idea or service innovation is celebrated for its contribution today, data can be given credit for its contribution to tangible business results. The data council can track and celebrate out-of-the-box ideas and achievements across business functions made using data and analytics.

What does this mean for SAPInsiders?

SAPInsiders serious about moving along on their data journey should focus as much on a data culture as on deploying various technologies. Some of the steps best-in-class companies take can be tried.

1. Set up a high-visibility data council – This council can be led by the CDO/CIO/CFO with business users from various functions and IT/data architects to develop vision, bring it to fruition, and slowly but steadily inculcate a data culture.
2. Curate quick wins and prioritize high-impact use cases – Using key metrics such as top-line/bottom-line impact while balancing with costs, risks, and regulatory compliance can help the data council focus on crafting an impactful strategy. Explore collaboration tools to receive submissions of use cases, discussing and tracking them to keep the momentum of the project.
3. Roll-out an enterprise-wide data strategy – A strategy with an accompanying roadmap for data analytics, data warehousing, and governance model for both transactional and master data, with clear guidelines for local exceptions, can be designed and communicated. Engage business uses in both the design of strategy and its execution, including technology evaluation, deployment, and training.
4. Continue rigorous culture-building activities using testimonials and training – Build an internal testimonial and acknowledgment process that recognizes specific actions taken to generate insights and the people – both business users and data architects – who clearly see the possibilities of the data.

  A potent data culture is likely to need both top-down executive expectation setting and bottom-up ownership. It is possible to build a virtuous cycle for data and analytics that can yield exponential results in a short time.