The Importance of investing in data foundations

Real-time insights. Hyper-personalisation. The ability to build and deploy AI models that drive change and revenue. We all want the benefits of data, but all too often we are not making the right decisions or putting in the hard graft to turn these theoretical benefits into reality. Legacy systems remain on, teams continue to operate as silos, internal expertise is outsourced, vanity projects take precedent, lack of ownership prevails, and silver bullets are relied on.

We have seen the same challenges over and over, where organisations do not have a clear view of how they will achieve data integrity, nor a clear owner who is given the responsibility and space to deliver data integrity.

We do see a lot of marketplace products, frameworks and solutions that profess to be out of the box fixes for the data problems facing growing organisations. And although the promises of these silver bullet solutions are attractive, they simplify the challenges that businesses face. They try to make data a generic problem and on the whole fail to consider the context of the business, the politics, the language, and the history of the organisation.

Data isn’t something that can be solved with a product, yet. We are far from having out of the box solutions that can help to solve the messy world of data. Particularly in a world where the volume of data is growing exponentially, and the need for good, clean, reliable data is growing accordingly.

Technology platforms have scaled significantly over the last few years. As has the volumes of data that the average company generates.

The number of compelling exploitation and data insights products and technologies has also increased, promising ground-breaking, transformative, AI generated insights etc. etc.

The problem is that the application of these advanced exploitation tools is often theoretical as the gap between the technology platforms and the way data needs to be structure and presented to get any value is massive.

This middle, some say boring, world of context, semantics, presentation layers, data models, data governance is underinvested. But it’s the most important part of making your data work for you.

We know that there is huge pressure to generate insights, but sometimes it’s best to pause take stock and work out the best way to get the highest value out of data.

Generating insights on broken, disparate, or untrusted systems is hugely expensive, and one that any CFO will quite rightly gawk at. Like a company asset, DATA needs a long term investment strategy to generate real returns. Taking time (maybe years) to get underlying systems consolidated, streamlined, and operationally sound, and implement a data culture that includes everyone and that is universally bought into will pay dividends in terms of the accuracy of insights, the accessibility of insights and the applications of those insights. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be easy. And it won’t be cheap. But as an important, if not the most important asset of your business, it will pay off to invest properly.