Is Your Organisation Data-Ready?

Geoff Palmer | Senior Consultant | Retail Reply, London, UK

Version 1.1 | June 2023

The Artificial Intelligence genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The promise is a human-like response to all our questions, drawing on an exhaustive search through all the published data available across the internet, or within your organisation.

The real question is this: is your organisation data-ready? Is everyone in your workforce sufficiently data literate and data mature to be able to critically evaluate what AI returns, rather than simply accepting it as the best possible answer in any situation?

And even if you are not using, or planning to use, AI – how confident are you in the data upon which you rely every day?

In a data-driven world, businesses are at increasing risk if they lack the data literacy and maturity they need to be fully in control of, and able to trust, their data.Are you prepared to take that risk? Here is why we at Retail Reply believe that not being data-ready is too big a risk to accept, and what we can help you do about it.

Organisations have had centuries to learn how to manage their money. There is a dedicated team who look after finances, and well-understood, prudent governance is federated throughout each part of the company. A huge sum is invested in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that tracks every penny or cent. Annual audits ensure that the governance is working as it should, and that all flows of money are transparent and legally compliant.

But most organisations have only had a relatively few years to learn how to manage their data. Most are still having to work hard to fully meet the compliance requirements of GDPR. And often, that compliance relies on extensive manual effort and limited tacit knowledge in the hands of a few specialist individuals who have been with the company for a long time, and who know the plethora of legacy systems. Data is usually widely dispersed, highly replicated, frequently captured in spreadsheets with undocumented ownership or oversight, for undocumented business purposes. Data governance is rarely resourced to anything like the level from which financial governance benefits, and yet the penalties for compliance breaches can be eye-wateringly large.

And, of course, a lack of mature data governance makes every initiative to become more data-driven, and every digital transformation programme, exponentially more expensive, extensive, and demanding.

Retail Reply consultants have the privilege of working with clients of all sizes, and we have identified common threads that unite most of them:

• Very few clients we see have managed to attain a uniform culture of data literacy and maturity throughout their workforce, resulting in issues over data understanding, application, and trust.
• Most organisations operate multiple legacy systems that share data in undocumented and opaque ways
• Younger staff often take data for granted without questioning it.
• Older staff tend to operate in data silos that reflect only their immediate task-based concerns.
• Rarely can everyone clearly articulate data's implications or its importance to their roles or their business.
• Even organisations with seemingly strong analytics & data science capabilities often have those specialists in a separate department, having to use what data they are given and unable to challenge the data origins, lineage, provenance, quality, timeliness, appropriateness, or lifecycle stage.

A truly data-driven business that can trust its data benefits from consistent levels of data literacy and maturity throughout the organisation, evidenced by both a natural common data language and assured adherence to strong, agreed data management and governance principles. At Retail Reply, we are developing an experience-based programme of consultancy to help clients attain data literacy as part of Data Maturity Level 3: a readily-achievable, cost-effective and pragmatic level that unlocks a huge amount of the data potential in any organisation.

Is your organisation data-ready? Retail Reply is here to help.