Why you Need a Vision for Data & Analytics

Some thoughts from my latest customer projects in Data & Analytics strategy

With my customers I like to start more and more often to define a vision for Data & Analytics. While some start with their already formulated IT or digital vision, others come from goals they set. Typically it is a process to reach a good formulation.

Some wants to have something crispy like Nike’s “Just do it” or Obamas “yes we can”. I understand that from a communication perspective. But does this really help? If you are not Nike or In the election campaign for the presidency, rather not. But to formulate a good vision is not easy, should be highly individual (typical question “do you have an example…?”) and needs a fit to your current situation and business goal.

Most of my customers are not really data-driven today. They are strong in their field and build regular reports to monitor their progress and processes. They have typically first AI initiatives running. They work somehow on their master data. In this situation I recommend being more specific and a little more detailed. I typically start indeed sometimes with an example (only in a common working mode, as the result at the end should for sure be different) and three questions:

• What are we doing?

• Why are we doing this?

• Who are we doing this for?

In Germany there is a very popular quote from Helmut Schmidt, former german Chancellor of Germany - “Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen.” / “If you have visions, you should see a doctor.”. As he was a kind of visionary on his own, I think we use this very often out of the context. But right, a vision should be something you really can imagine to reach in the next years, because it make sense for you as a company. It shouldn’t be something completely illusory.

A vision is not a goal you can measure against and not a roadmap you can follow. And it is for sure not how you do things. It is more like a north star for all the people in the company to understand and commit about what the usage of data for the company means. This is important because as detailed and current your strategy is, it will never give you all the answers for your daily business.

A vision is a long-term target state you want to reach. A promise to your users or internal customers what data & analytics should be and help. But it is not a forever-thing. Therefore you have to formulate your vision with the business. I often work rather on the IT side with strategy. Often for IT this is a difficult point, depending on their company culture. But it is very important to be aligned here.

The more a customer can formulate such a vision, the more he get an understanding about, what is really important. To work on this over some time is an important step for a strategy, resulting in clarity and focus.

Beside the vision we work on formulating a mission, too. The mission is very similar but it is for the data team itself and should help them to understand how to bring the vision alive. As they are the only one, which are not the target group of the vision, they should have a separate statement. This can be easy, this can be complex. It depends on the team size, challenges and general mindset of the team. Typically it is more feasible, like a high level goal statement. I start with the following questions:

• Where do we want to go?

• When do we want to reach our goal?

• How do we want to proceed?

Once a CIO told me when talking about strategy, that to communicate the strategy and operationalize everything, this would be a lot of work and many talks needs to be done. He was right. And if your data is already on a good state and used well, don’t do something you see no value in. But if you want to be a winner of the data and digital economy this is the work you have to do. And it starts with a good vision.

Do you have a vision for data & analytics in your enterprise? Is it communicated well? Do you find it helpful? What was the path towards a good vision for you?