Data Consultancy
Generate actionable insights, uncover business intelligence, design data strategies, and build data products with our expert data consultants.
Data Consultancy Set Up to Support on Data Strategy and Data Governance
In a world where school children can use AI to write their homework, personalised recommendations are a given and legislation is requiring businesses to intimately know and report on the minutiae of each domain – data is king. This is why an increasing number of organisations are building their own data products.
What is often lacking within an organisations data products is:
- A clear organisation-wide data strategy
- Good data governance and data literacy across those interpreting the business intelligence reports
In addition to these challenges, information is often stored across multiple systems and spreadsheets – tucked away from the people that need it most. As such, uncovering insight can be time consuming and frustrating, limiting access to business intelligence.
Building a data capability and potentially a data product is the best way for businesses to:
- Connect disparate sources of data
- Generate actionable insights
- Operationalise data for trading gains and efficiency
- Leverage modern technologies such as predictive insights and AI – it just needs operational and strategic consideration as well as technical
Our Data Consultancy Services
We can help you liberate data from 3rd party systems and spreadsheets and turn it from a time-sink into an asset. This is done through:
- Designing a data strategy and architecture for the whole business, including what data to collect and create to achieve the businesses goals
- Building data storage, processing, and management infrastructure
- Driving business intelligence and creating analytics capabilities
- Managing operational change to improve organisation-wide data governance and quality
We work across all data types from product, customer, sales, ESG, and other business information.
Data Strategy
We help design data strategies that align with business principles to drive growth and achieve long-term success.
Business Intelligence
We create data capabilities that can generate ongoing business intelligence to the people who need to make decisions and take action.
Any Type of Data
We work with B2B and B2C organisations to collect, store and process a range of data types across our data consultancy.
Common Data Problems We Solve
If you are at the start of your data journey, then the first problem to solve is usually answering the question:
What is the right data strategy to enable the businesses goals?
This helps to set-out the right data architecture and tooling necessary to mature your businesses data capabilities in line with your strategic objectives. Our data consultancy is primarily made up of data strategists and architects that focus on this question. Other problems that we help with are:
1. Unifying data by breaking down departmental barriers
Often each department will have found ways to access and process data to inform decisions and achieve objectives. When organisations do not have a unified data strategy then there is often a cottage industry of report building, data processing, 3rd party tooling for collection, duplication of metrics and a house-of-cards approach to data. Building a governance team that offers a centralised toolkit for each department breaks down data silo’s, builds resilience into the operations and improves business intelligence. Our data consultancy arm not only designs data strategies for collection and storage but will also support in reshaping your organisation to cater for better data governance and capabilities across all business units.
2. Operationalising data
Liberating data from legacy systems, 3rd parties and spreadsheets so that teams can use it to drive decisions and customer experiences is the best way to improve efficiency and grow profit. We can help assess what data is already being collected, work out where it needs to be and move the data into a useful state through our data consultancy arm. Driving next-best action messaging and surfacing information to reduce friction points in customer experiences enables data to become a tool rather than just a historical record of action.
3. Best-fit data repositories
Some types of data benefit from specialist data storage repositories that help those involved in daily data management do their jobs well. Whether it is a PIM for products or a CDP for customers, we can help identify what types of data in your organisation need specialist repositories and find the best tool for the job. Our data consultancy has helped implement these systems many times over and can work with you on distinct data storage projects, or as part of a wider data transformation project.
4. Collection strategies for ESG initiatives
There is a rise in focus on ESG data – either through legislation, business commitment for improved business practices, or both. Some of this data may already exist and just needs to be surfaced for reporting. However, in a lot of instances this data needs to be collected. Our data consultants can help identify what information is necessary to drive and report on ESG initiatives and put in strategies to collect, store, and provide actionable insight.
5. Data measurement frameworks
Top-line KPIs focused on the financials are great for assessing the economic health of an organisation, but they don’t shed much light on gaps and opportunities. Our data consultants can design measurement frameworks that support a customer experience strategy to give ongoing insight into how well experiences are meeting expectations. If you are regularly being handed a report with unexplainable changes in top-line metrics or are relying on ‘gut feel’ to explain variations, then a measurement framework can provide reliable insight.
6. Data governance
Collecting and storing data requires data management. Centralised governance models mean that good quality data is being stored, the business can understand what is available in storage and appropriate retention and sharing policies are being enacted. Without this, data can easily become polluted or pushed to places it shouldn’t be. For some businesses full-time data governance isn’t necessary but a regular audit or check-up is necessary to keep on track, which our data consultants can support with.
How We Deliver Your Data Strategy – The Profound Way
Building a data capability is iterative. It typically starts with a strategic engagement with our data consultants to define a data strategy. This is then used to inform a data architecture and work out an operational model that can bring the architecture to life, including data governance. From here data storage, data processing and data visualisation tools are put in place at a pace that is right for the business.
It is normal that you will have some level of reporting or insight that will need to be re-created with the new data product as a first step before new capabilities are added to the business. Sometimes this can feel like investing effort and resources into technology just to get back to a status-quo, however, we will always look for ways to ensure the first iteration of the data product delivers efficiency gains or streamlined insight back into the business.
Once the foundational data product(s) are up and running, there will be a roadmap of changes to collect or feed more data into the product or find new ways to make the data. This roadmap will include helping you re-shape operations, products and experiences to maximise the benefits of this new data capability to drive efficiencies and business intelligence.
The philosophy of our data consultancy is to accept that data is in a constant state of flux and to build strategies around that. This is because data is representative of a current state and as it is being collected to inform decisions to change that state, the new state needs to be regularly anticipated and catered for in the capabilities and products.
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