How to create a data-first organization

Data can give your organization a competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving business landscape, allowing you to respond swiftly to market changes, customer demands and emerging technologies.

Modernizing and automating processes through digital transformation can increase efficiency and cost savings while allowing organizations to better understand and engage with their customers by enabling personalized experiences, efficient customer service and the ability to meet evolving customer expectations.

However, advanced data preparation is imperative to achieve a winning digital transformation strategy. Data quality tools are only as good as the information they utilize. Preparing and refining organizational data is critical in enabling your organization to maximize its digital transformation investment.

A data-first strategy

The traditional approach to migrating data to a new system begins with a comprehensive assessment of all existing data sources before the data is mapped to the new system to ensure data is accurately transferred and maintains its integrity during migration. This mechanical approach doesn’t challenge an organization to consider what they want to be able to see and do with their data at the end of the transformation journey.

Instead of waiting to address the challenges in assessing and organizing data within the program or near the end of the program, near cutover, a data-first strategy recommends organizations embrace the extraction of historical and current data on the front end as soon as possible of any digital transformation initiative to enhance its overall success.

By providing visibility into your data on day one, organizations can assess their data quality to understand what is needed to get it into the desired future state that will provide organizational value at the end of the transformation journey.

Baker Tilly’s data quality assessment

Integrating a data quality assessment (DQA) into the initial phases of your digital transformation journey provides an evaluation of the data quality before process discussions, allowing you to determine where the concentration of project focus should be for the initiative. Understanding the current state of your organization’s data quality is paramount for the success of your digital transformation and guides the organization where it must focus for success.