Data Strategy and the Enterprise Data Executive

Organizations have prepared for dramatic change and determined how to do the work. They have also recruited qualified EDEs to oversee the transformation and behavioral changes, and they have eliminated the Seven Deadly Data Sins. Now let us focus on the practical matter of producing a data strategy, some of the obstacles that confront this work, what organizations should consider when they produce their data strategies and what they should include in their documentation. In this chapter, we describe the specific steps involved in developing, implementing and communicating a data strategy. This work is part of Phase II, and we assume organizations have already completed the Phase I prerequisites.

Figure 4.1 illustrates organizational achievements as ready-to-start Phase II iterations. Each cycle represents an opportunity to improve organizational data strategy and governance practices. Phase II's continual process improvement is referred to as "lather, rinse, repeat" because it involves a deliberate programmatic effort to continually improve the way data assets are used to help facilitate the implementation of the organizational strategy. Support for the strategy is an iterative process described below.