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Use your existing data to answer old business questions in new and better ways

Data underpins every aspect of our lives. Businesses and organisations across the world spend millions capturing, manipulating and analysing it to make real time business decisions, respond to changing market conditions, remove cost and maximise cross-selling opportunities.

Get it right and this data will provide fresh insight to enable you to answer old business questions in new and better ways.

Get it wrong and the data challenges you face will manifest themselves in slow business growth, duplication across the business, slow time to market and poor decision making.

What are the key data challenges?

The key challenges include:

Supply chain: sourcing the right data at the right time
Governance: making sure the data you have is well managed
Engineering: connecting the right datasets so they can be used by multiple people
Standardisation: making sure data is of consistent quality and fit to be used.

Often, the catalyst to address these challenges is the point where data that has been captured and managed for many years by different parts of the business and to different specifications is suddenly brought together in new enterprise-wide data services.

Whilst this is often the right thing to do, the downside of this is that it can take time (months and in some cases years) to achieve full utilisation of the data, to answer those old business questions.

Is there a better way?

Yes. As you address your key data challenges, why not concurrently use the data in whatever state it is in, to rapidly develop new data products to address the here and now business requirements.

Often this takes a leap of faith to make happen, but in our experience, if you start simply by focussing on a single business requirement and adopting an agile delivery approach you can deliver real business benefit early.

Create an agile delivery team that can focus on the delivery of data innovation products to meet the here and now business goals. These data innovation products can use data analytics to look back in time to provide fresh insight; or use data science to predict what may happen in the future based on the evidence provided.

Where do you start?

Bring together all the skills required to deliver at pace into one agile team – Data Science, Data Management, Data Engineering, Developers, Tester and Business Change capability. Align the team with a business sponsor and set about answering a specific business problem. Focus the team on rapidly developing fresh insight to answer old business questions in new and better ways.

Do you need change expertise?

At Project One, we have helped and worked with many customers, leveraging the extensive experience of our team of change, digital and data professionals, to help them deliver their goals. We have a simple and pragmatic approach that helps our customers through every step of their own bespoke journey, and we would be delighted to help you through yours.

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