What's your Data Story?

In recent years, many companies have focused on introducing data-driven business and decision-making processes in order to achieve better and faster results. These efforts have centred on data and analytics initiatives, which have been backed by the necessary investments to achieve the desired added value.

In addition to more effective decision-making processes, the aim was to identify optimisation potential along the digital value chain, improve overall data quality and establish strong data governance. The problem with this is that all of these added values, which are typically associated with D&A, are very difficult to quantify and their realisation usually lies in the future.

This raises the question for D&A managers of how they can justify their own efforts and derive metrics from the added value they generate that are understood and accepted by the relevant departments in the company. This is no easy task, because while decision-makers typically focus on simple, monetary KPIs, the outcome of D&A initiatives is qualitative and, at first glance, often cannot be directly linked to financial or clear KPIs.

Connecting these two worlds and making the corresponding dependencies and relationships visible is the big challenge facing D&A teams today. In this paper, we clarify the extent to which this can affect the entire organisation and what steps are necessary to achieve this.