Data & Technology Strategy

OVERVIEW

We offer Data Strategy consulting to enable your organisation to align internal and external data to your Strategic Business Vision, Plan and Growth Drivers and facilitate data first technology solutions:

1) End-to-end Data and Technology Strategy - 2 month programme

2) Data Strategy Benchmark Workshop - A great place to start if you’re not ready to commit resources to a full programme, and to help you prepare for a full programme

Chief Data & Technology Officer, Michael “the code whisperer” McDonald is also available to provide the strategic direction for companies that do not have a CTO/CDO.

3) CTO/CDO - ad hoc data and technology strategy consulting

Contact us via the form or email: moreinfo@flatworld.world

Our Point of View

The goal of Data Strategy is to have a clear plan on how your organisation’s data will drive both your operational and long-term goals. 

While most organisations have a reasonable understanding of what data they use to perform daily operations, few have a longer term and holistic view – it is more often than not fragmented and siloed.

Whether you have a large organisation with multiple products or a group of organisations that act under one brand, the visibility and use of data across and between products or organisations is virtually non-existent other than a few Excel extracts of varying accuracy, in some cases presented as a dashboard. Data is often more disparate when there have been mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, where success actually depends upon alignment and efficiencies. 

Regardless of the organisation’s structure, many organisations have not considered that they are interacting with the customer via a data ecosystem of internal and external sources (whereby the customer can be a consumer, partner, supplier, stakeholder or employee), and they only have a part of this – usually the siloed, operational internal data as outlined above.  In many cases, exacerbated by stacks of new and legacy technologies that don’t talk to each other.

Combine this with the fluid nature of business – new and changing markets, products, partners, employees; organic and inorganic growth - and you have a situation where you don’t know:

-      What data you have and what you don’t to be able to measure success, identify issues and new opportunities;

-      How and where your data is used, posing a threat to data security, cyber security, legislation and compliance requirements and customer trust.

A Data Strategy that considers data first and then overlays the technology capability to enable the data strategy is needed to solve this – providing a clear benchmark and road map on how to manage and leverage your data and data relationships, now and in the future, while balancing the often conflicting element of compliance, security and trust. 

Our Approach

1. Briefing and planning

2. Investigation: understanding organisation structure and business model, strategic business plan and drivers, internal/external data sources across six key areas, security and compliance

3. Data Benchmark & Gap Analysis: develop a target state of data against the organisation’s future vision vs where you are now and identify the gaps

4. Strategic Roadmap: develop goals, time horizons, prioritise, rationalise and identify how to fill the gaps, and map the journey

5. Tactical goals: define specific pathways from where you are now to where you need to go and consider the plan from different perspectives including data systems, compliance and data security, data as a an asset; organisational change, IT development, external sources; data ecosystem

Where do I start?

Michael McDonald, CTO/CDO of FlatWorld Integration, has partnered with Rachel Bevans, Managing Director Strategy & Planning of The Healthy Brand Company, to design a Data Strategy Benchmark Workshop specifically for organisations who are aware of the issues and opportunities surrounding their data, but aren’t sure where to start; or have started and aren’t sure where to go to next; and want an objective, external view of their data before they invest significant amounts of time, money, people resources on the area.

The workshop delivers a Data Benchmark against your organisation’s Strategic Business Vision, Plan and Growth Drivers. We work to initially understand your key business priorities and strategic drivers towards customer centricity, resource and process efficiency, agile organisation transformation, digital transformation, data security and compliance, brand reputation etc.

We guide you through a review of your entire data ecosystem of internal and external data sources across six key areas including: financial; operations, production and supply chain; data, insight, strategy, innovation and technology; brand, customer and marketing; people, culture and capability; legal, risk, compliance and security. 

Together we develop the target state of data against your organisation’s future vision and compare it against the current state of data from the review, conducting a gap analysis to identify the key gaps that need to be filled. 

Written up, this provides the Data Benchmark that will provide you with the start point developing a strategic roadmap, identifying priorities and how to fill the gaps,  tactical goals and implementation.

There is no obligation to use Fl@World data ecosystem technology.

Contact us via the form here or directly at moreinfo@flatworld.com to find out more.