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🫨 Data tech ≠ data strategy you guys.

Too many data folks confuse a data strategy for a shopping list of tools and tech…

I get it though… SaaS sales people have done a phenomenal job convincing us that tools maketh the data team (🥩 no beef with sale people, they cool).

Sure, tools and tech are a cornerstone data capabilities in any org. But your data strategy they are not.

A real data strategy is about making your organisation’s actual overarching strategy deliverable with data. It's the part of the strategy that outlines how the people, processes and technologies within the data function will be managed and aligned to help accomplish these goals. In some circumstances, this can be achieve without investing in new tools.

Unfortunately, that’s not how most data strategies are being built. In today’s edition of Strategies For Effective Data Leadership, we’re gonna find out why that’s bad and how to fix it.

Buckle up.

🥲 Why getting data strategy wrong can cost you…

Here are the pitfalls data leaders fall into when they treat data strategy as a tech play rather than a business strategy play:

1. You lose credibility
Business leaders hear you talk about platforms and pipelines and think, “Nice, but how does this grow revenue, reduce costs or keep us alive next year?” If you can’t answer that, I’m afraid you’ve lost them.

2. You end up fighting for scraps
If your “strategy” is just a list of technical toys, you’ll constantly be begging for budget against functions who are directly aligned to strategic and commercial goals. Spoiler: they’ll win and you’ll be frustrated.

3. You build the wrong things
Without clarity on the overarching organisational strategy, you could be building beautiful dashboards that no one needs, or scaling projects/tools that don’t help move the business needle. It looks like progress because it is tangible, but it’s just wasted effort.

4. You risk becoming irrelevant
When leadership realises your team isn’t aligned with where the company is actually heading, you’ll be sidelined. At best, you’ll become a reporting factory. At worst, you’ll be restructured out of existence.

Curiously, CDOs are among the shortest tenured C-suite roles. This is largely attributed to their failure to demonstrate ROI for their organisations - a symptom of poor data strategy alignment with overarching business goals.

🛣️ The path forward

The uncomfortable truth: your data strategy is not separate to the organisational strategy.

It’s part of it.

That means step one is to get really clear on what your company’s actual strategy is. If you don’t know it or no one has told you, ask. Thought it not being clearly communicated around the business is red flag in itself. 🚩

And if you find out it doesn’t exist, you’ve got a much bigger problem than “what data stack should we buy this year?”

👉🏼 If you need brushing up on corporate strategy concepts, grab a copy of this book for yourself and your team.

From there:

• Map your data strategy to business outcomes. Start every initiative with, “How does this directly support the organisation’s strategic priorities?” If you can’t connect the dots, then bin it and move on.

• Speak the business language. Data people love to talk features. Executives care about business outcomes. Stop pitching for technical capabilities and expansion and start discussing the impacts your data work expects to provide.

• Position yourself as part of the strategic machine. Data isn’t a bolt-on or something that sits aside from the rest of the org just doing it’s thing.. Your job is to show how your function is essential in delivering what the company already says it wants. Because, let’s be real - that’s what they’ve told their shareholders, and that’s what your bosses will be bonused on.

Do this well and your “data strategy” stops being just another PowerPoint schematic that no one looks at. It becomes the evidence-backed, execution-ready part of the company strategy designed and working in unison to make the whole thing possible.

Tristan Burns

Find me on LinkedIn or Book a 1:1 call