It's all about data

A decade ago, everyone was talking about digital transformation, paperless businesses, and automation. The motto back then was: ‘Every business is a technology business’ – this still rings true today.

However, because digital transformation acted as a catalyst and driver for businesses to collect and use more data through a variety of tools and means, we realised that if the data they were using was not properly managed, their technology would become a liability rather than an enabler. This realisation led to the new motto with which this article starts.

For a variety of reasons, including a lack of data literacy, or lack of resources and time to think about data, many organisations and business leaders continue to underestimate its importance.

Before we get into the specifics and demonstrate why every company is now a data business, let’s consider this: as a business leader, what do you hope to accomplish? To help you answer this question, think about your objectives and goals, related to your industry. You might be surprised to learn how similar the majority of the goals and challenges faced by all businesses are. Some of these include:

• Growing revenue by making informed decisions

• Reducing costs by optimising and automating business processes and operations

• Retaining customers and brand reputation

• Achieving compliance in line with local and/or global regulators

Of course, you can think of many additional potential objectives. However, the aspirations that most business leaders seek will fall within the proximity of the aforementioned targets.

To make informed decisions that would support your business, you first need to determine your goals, then break them down into achievable parts and attach them to relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These KPIs are then tied to data, which must be readily available and of reasonable quality.

Optimising processes’ costs and efforts can be achieved by eliminating process silos between business functions. Data also needs to be made readily available and securely shared between different stakeholders. This can be accomplished if you have some basic foundations in place across your organisation, such as a business glossary and a data catalogue, which allow for some initial data democratisation.

Remember that many data elements are shared across departments and business lines, especially Master & Reference Data, which are ‘viewed’ and consumed differently by each of those business lines. We acknowledge that having multiple systems within an organisation may be unavoidable, but starting with a common terminology and a centralised data catalogue is a good place to start.

Retaining customers and reputation can be maintained if you build and use advanced analytics to understand customers’ needs, groups, and categories. This can be achieved if you have data that is of appropriate quality and ready to be mined and analysed.

On the other hand, if you properly secure your assets, especially data, you can enhance your organisation’s impenetrability and protect and maintain its reputation. Just think about what would happen if there were security breaches and sensitive data leaked; the outfall of this event would be exacerbated if a company either failed to protect its data in the first place, or worse, were unaware of the breach. Besides a number of issues that could come with such a breach, the first thing that would come to mind is your company’s reputation.

Last but not least is compliance, which is an objective (or perhaps an enforced requirement) for multiple industries such as financial, sustainability, or healthcare, to name but a few. Data management and data reporting work hand in hand, with the latter depending on the former to ensure correct and risk-free reporting (risks such as regulatory fines).

How can we achieve this?

As a data consultant with experience across multiple industries, one major quality which is inevitable to consider is that in order to be successful in reporting, decision making, disclosure or compliance, some data housekeeping needs to take place in advance.

At WSP Middle East, we advise our clients to consider their end goals, map their business processes to the data lifecycle, and establish basic initiatives such as devising data policies and procedures which govern data collection as a starting point. We then develop a common business glossary and terminologies, identify the data elements relevant to business processes (the Critical Data elements), factor in reporting and disclosure, and of course, evaluate the quality of this pertinent data, before considering acquiring any digital solution out of the blue (to manage their daily activities and industry-specific operational tasks).

If overlooked, these foundational ‘Data Housekeeping’ activities, might result in wrong or bad insights, insecure data and, non-compliance.

People: As data producers and consumers, are peoples’ data roles being defined? Is there a plan to form a data committee, a data leader, or other roles such as a data steward and custodian? What is the organisation’s data literacy level? And are there any training or awareness plans in place?

Processes: Every business line within an organisation has a set of procedures and processes to manage its day-to-day operations. The question we pose here is whether these processes are mapped to the data lifecycle or if they are designed and built in isolation without taking into account the relevant data elements involved in these procedures. For instance, you might have a procedure defined for air emissions management (assuming your business line was in charge of environment & sustainability mandates at your organisation), complete with roles and responsibilities, sub-processes, workflows and expected outcomes. However, the data elements relevant to air emissions management may not yet have been defined, or at least consolidated, nor the business or quality rules regarding them are known; in such a scenario, attempting to implement this procedure will encounter roadblocks such as where to obtain the data, whether it is even available, if so in which system, who owns it, or how to collect it.

What we recommend is to ensure those procedures are in line with the core data policies and procedures. If these don’t exist, they need to be created, as well as compiling a data catalogue of relevant data elements that links each element to the procedure(s) in which it is used, created and/or involved.

Tools: These include forms, documents, excel sheets, shared drives, and other digital solutions that are used to manage data (both structured and un-structured) and business-specific procedures. They are not limited to the sophisticated software or complex digital solutions that the business has purchased.

Common questions we typically ask when assessing tools are:

• Which tools are being used to manage data from collection to insights & disclosure?
• Do other business lines utilise the same tools?
• What rules apply to the data, how is it safeguarded, where is it kept and how is it processed?
• Do business stakeholders have the ability to visualize relevant KPIs?
• Can they build their own dashboards for business specific and operational KPIs?

With this initial assessment completed and the foundations (housekeeping activities) established, we can now take a measured risk and go further by implementing a business-specific solution, such as tools for managing financial operations, ERPs, CRMs, and ESG management and reporting. When combined with a strong enterprise-wide data management platform, these tools would be the organisation's best option.

Many business stakeholders think that by implementing a new digital solution, their day-to-day challenges would be solved, and reporting and disclosure will become a seamless, flawless process. However, this isn’t necessarily true as it strongly depends on the underlying data and not the tool itself.

Starting from the end, as exciting as it might seem, does not always solve the problem. A procured solution will eventually become a liability to the company and will be added to a long list of applications that are not used to their full potential. At that point, the cycle of searching for a new ‘better’ solution will start again; in such case you would be treating the symptoms rather than solving the root of the cause.