Data & Analytics Strategy Consulting

As the world becomes increasingly digital, generating insight from new and existing data and information sources - and using that to drive business performance - is increasingly essential for business growth and success. But to do this effectively requires the right data and information foundations, which is why many organisations choose to develop a Data and Analytics Strategy (also known as an Information Management Strategy). As with most transformative change, realising the true potential of your information assets requires excellence in both strategy and delivery

Hence a Data & Analytics Strategy (which may also be known as or encompass a data science strategy, business analytics strategy, or data analysis strategy) is the key foundational step in driving insight and business value from information. In some businesses, providing evidence of a clear enterprise data and analytics strategy for internal audit is becoming mandatory. However, many organisations struggle to get to grips with their data strategy, finding the topic too broad, too nebulous to define, or too difficult to assign executive accountability for.
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We can help you develop a robust, practical and actionable data and analytics strategy that encompasses the 6 key components that we believe should form part of a comprehensive strategy:

Vision, Strategy & Roadmap

Governance

Information Operations

Organisation & Roles

Metrics & Insights

​Architecture

As with all our strategy work, our ‘low volume, high value’ model means we won’t overwhelm with large teams or take months to produce results. Typically only using one or two highly experienced and high calibre people, we will work closely as an integral part of your team bringing all our data strategy expertise, experience and insights; our understanding of ‘what good looks like’ in terms of the outputs; and the ability to drive a strong, collaborative strategy development process. But we’ll never force through a rigid process, think we understand your business better than you do, or bring a one-size-fits-all cookie cutter answer. Doing the work ‘with you, not to you’ in this way gets to results that have real ownership and buy-in.

Data & Analytics Strategy: developing a strategy to put in place all the data capabilities needed (see framework below) to enable your organisation to drive insight and business value from data.

Data & Analytics Delivery: executing your strategy, and using those data capabilities effectively to drive insights from your data – be that through basic reporting; business intelligence (BI); or advanced predictive, prescriptive and automated analytics - and using those insights to drive business performance and growth.

Many organisations believe that there is significant untapped value in their information assets that they could leverage much more effectively to drive business performance. This could include significantly improved insights in areas such as:

Customers and customer behaviours, leading to more effective customer relationship management and customer service, with a greater ability to cross-sell and up-sell.

Profitability and cost to serve, enabling greater focus on the product / service variants, pricing, promotions and sales channels that have the most potential to drive revenue and margin growth.

Sales, operations and financial planning, with significantly improved ability to accurately forecast; align cross-functional, integrated plans; do ‘what if?’ scenario modelling; and predict what approach will drive the best business outcomes.

Operational excellence, highlighting the previously unrealised opportunities for efficiency gains and cost reductions.

Innovation, understanding how customers use and interact with your products and services, and greater insights on what innovations customers really want and would pay more for.

This untapped potential in data is greatly increased by the availability of, and the processing power to analyse, new data sources from both within the organisation (e.g. detailed data around how customers use your web site, and how and when they buy from you) and from outside it (e.g. social media sentiment, digitisation of everyday consumer behaviours, the Internet of Things, competitor and market share data, data from third party logistics providers, and geospatial data such as weather).

We’ve worked with many of the world’s leading companies to develop their data and information management strategies. But because we also work on data and analytics delivery, we don’t believe in ivory-tower, abstract strategies that look fine on paper but fail the first test of implementation. Rather, we believe in practical and actionable strategy, supported by a clear implementation roadmap and investment case, to transform your business into a properly insights-led, data-centric organisation. We can help you balance and combine resolving the data and reporting issues of today, with exploiting the value of modern analytics that will future-proof your business for tomorrow – two goals that can be seen as conflicting in many organisations.

As with all our strategy work, our ‘low volume, high value’ model means we won’t overwhelm with large teams or take months to produce results. Typically only using one or two highly experienced and high calibre people, we will work closely as an integral part of your team bringing all our data strategy expertise, experience and insights; our understanding of ‘what good looks like’ in terms of the outputs; and the ability to drive a strong, collaborative strategy development process. But we’ll never force through a rigid process, think we understand your business better than you do, or bring a one-size-fits-all cookie cutter answer. Doing the work ‘with you, not to you’ in this way gets to results that have real ownership and buy-in.