TD:LR

When working as a Fractional Chief Data Officer or an Enterprise Data Architect I would often get hired to help organisations take stock of where their data capabilities are currently at, where they want to go in the future and what they could do to get there.

Business Strategy drives future data capability

I needed to understand the organisation’s planned business strategy and then I could work on how data and information can be used to support that strategy in the future.

Without that I was flying blind, to say the least.

Three Macro Data Use Cases

To kick off one of the many conversations in this space, I used to ask which of these three macro data use cases the Organisations believed were its priorities to achieve their business strategy:

• Providing data to Customers
• Supporting Internal Processes
• Providing data to External Organisations

Let me drill down on those three a little more.

Providing data to Customers, is where you provide a product or service to customers, and as part of that process you also provide data to those customers.

If you are a Financial Services company, your Customers can see their personal financial information, if you are an ecommerce company, customers can see their orders, shipments etc.

The key is you are providing the Customers with their own data, by providing that data to them has value to them and therefore to you.

The consumer of this data is your Customers.

You might also provide data to them that includes anonymised or aggregated data from multiple Customers, for example in the form of a benchmark, but again they have to be a Customer of your core products or services for you to do this.

Supporting Internal Processes, is where you use your data internally to improve the health of your business.

Examples are Financial reporting to see if you are making or losing money, Marketing and Sales Funnels to see if you are getting more customers or losing them, Product Analytics to see who is using what product feature and who isn’t, Cross Sell / Upsell models to sell more of your products and services to your current Customers, Contact Center reporting to see who is contacting you and how you are helping them (or not).

The key is you are using your Customers data to manage and improve your business, and ideally that results in a better product or service to your Customer.

The Consumer of this data is your team.

Providing data to External Organisations, is where you give or sell your Customers data, or insights from your Customers data, to other Organisations.

Now ideally you will only be selling anonymised or aggregated data to these Organisations, you will have your Customers permission to do so and even better you would be doing some form of revenue share with your Customers to share the value received for this data.

Examples are Industry Benchmark Data to allow others to compare their Customers to yours, Behavioral and/or Demographic Data which is typically used to enhance the targeting of Ads and Marketing, Fraud Data to help crowd source the identification of repeated fraudulent behaviour.

The key is you are monetising your Customers data by providing it to a third party that is not your Customer. Giving it away is the same as monetising it, as you are typically giving it away in exchange for some sort of value, even if it is not money.

The Consumer of this data is somebody at arms length to your Organisation and your Customers.

Common edge cases

A couple of edge case examples that always come up.

What happens if you have a business model where you have External Organisations that directly support your customers?

Well if the Customers pays those Organisitions to support them, then they fit in the Providing data to your Customer use case.

What happens if you have a business model where you have External Organisations that help you run and manage your business?

If you are paying the Organisation to help you manage your business, then it fits in the Supporting Internal Processes use case.

Use cases drive the need for data capability

Each of these three strategic / macro data use cases come with specific data architectures, data work and also impact the context of how you would design your agile data ways of working.

Hence the importance of understanding if one, two or all three of them were required to help deliver the Business Strategy.

And when they will be needed.

Keep making data simply magical