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Data Strategy on a Tight Budget
Regular readers of our blog will be familiar with our frequent suggestion that you should deploy data review teams and use subject matter experts to come up with clever solutions to data-based problems. “That’s all well and good,” you might say, “for companies that have dedicated staff for working only on data problems or massive amounts of information that need to be sifted by subject matter experts. What about companies that are smaller, have a less intense need for dedicated staff, or who simply don’t want to spend the money?” Fair enough, that’s probably a good representation of how most businesses feel about managing the data in their possession.
We should clarify things a bit, then. While it may seem like there’s a need to have specialists and dedicated staff, that’s not what we recommend at all. Certainly, if you have the ability to bring in data scientists and data visualization experts, and there’s a need for it, great: go for it. But most businesses are not in that position and shouldn’t need to feel like they have an obligation to lay out the kind of resources necessary to build that kind of a team. Instead, what they need to do is engage in prioritization and re-categorization thought exercise.
“Great,” you may think, “we’ve moved from unrealistic expectations of staff and resources to unhelpful jargon!” That would be fair enough, too. So let’s break down what we mean a little bit.
