Strategy Is Greater Than Technology
To make data valuable, strategy is essential.
When it comes to working with data, strategy is of greater importance than technology. This post expains why.
Strategy Determines Technology
If you have good strategy, it determines what technology you will use.
Quite often, the technology treats the symptom but doesn't identify the root problem. Strategy does.
You may have poor data quality and get a tool to fix it. But if you don't use correct business rules, it likely won't fix the data the way you need it. Plus, you should really fix it at the source (more on that in a moment).
Strategy Is About Fundamentals
Strategy is about data fundamentals, not the latest tool that people fall in love with because it does something cool.
The fundamentals are concepts like Governance, Strategy, Standard, SOPs, documentation and the like.
Unfortunatley, technical people like to build technology. It is pretty common to have quick meeting jot a few notes and start building stuff.
A better, more strategic process spends much more time on understanding requirements, actually writes out a plan gets sign off from stakeholders, then builds or buys the right technicnology and provides good training to those that will use it.
Processes Fix Data Problems
Companies buy incredible technology and still have data problems. I have worked for them. For example, I have worked with companies that invested many thousands of dollars in technology of all sorts, but still had problems with data quality. Why is that?
Because Data Quality isn't fundamentally a technology solution. It is solved by strategy that changes processes.
In this example, many of the source systems had poor data quality, because the company had no strategy and data standards. The lack of standards was the root problem, poor data quality was the symptom. Since the source data was never fixed, no technology product was going to fix thier issues. I was constantly having to fix the data downstream during the transformation process. It would have been much better for the company to fix the data at the source by having some actual data standards.