More Data Doesn’t Make You More Digital

Have you ever gotten home from the grocery store, unloaded all the bags and then looked around and said — what am I going to cook for dinner? That’s how we increasingly see the state of data in businesses today. The focus is primarily on obtaining and acquiring data: How do I get data, how do I structure it, where do I house it?

All of these are important questions and considerations, of course. But for businesses to become truly data-driven — as most are striving to do — they might be better off starting not on the supply side of the equation (grocery shopping) but with the question of demand: making dinner.

In other words, what’s the reason you want the data in the first place? Which business outcomes are you trying to drive? What decisions are you going to make? How are you going to activate the data?

Only then should you ask which data you really need. This could be in the form of personalization you need to generate, a capability you want to activate, a safety issue you want to mitigate, a performance metric you want to improve, a regulation you need to comply with, machinery you want to keep operating. What is the business outcome that — using data — you can optimize?

By starting with the demand question, it’s easier to hypothesize which data may be potentially relevant. From there, you can start to work upstream to determine how and where to get the relevant data, which is primarily obtained in two ways: captured in the ordinary course of doing business or acquired through an external channel, whether it’s a broker, an exchange or another partnership.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognizant/2021/08/20/more-data-doesnt-make-you-more-digital/?sh=1f6797a84205