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The evolution of digital technologies, frequent innovations, and changes in people’s behavior in recent years has brought disruptions to businesses. All aspects of business models are impacted by the changes.
These factors add more complexity and challenge strategic thinking.
Competitive strategies are strongly linked to organizations’ ability to innovate:
Innovation is the creative destruction capable of developing new productive combinations with the consequent abandonment of old and obsolete practices.
Competitiveness is based on innovation, it being the main fuel for capitalist development. Obviously organizations need to have the necessary resources to gain competitive advantage.
One of the most important resources today: People who have differentiated and relevant knowledge and who can generate competitive advantage. There is an emerging need to have an executive team that is able to argue drawing upon data and their professional experiences – not just providing their opinion. This intangible value manifests in an organization’s results.
Data Literacy
According to Gartner, “data literacy” is the ability to read, work, analyze, and argue with data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, applied analytical methods and techniques, and the ability to describe the use case, application, and resulting value.
People, processes, and technology are the three most important elements for better business outcomes, Gartner says, and it is necessary to create an organizational culture that is literate in data and values information as an asset. Data and analytics leaders must show leadership in three key areas: business data value, data-related cultural change, and Data Management ethics and uses.
Data Fallacy
An organization’s competitiveness is directly connected with its digital dexterity and how the organization takes advantage of rapidly evolving technological innovations. It is a fallacy to believe that innovation occurs only by applying digital technologies without considering architectural components that underpin digital innovation. One of the key architectural components is the data that is part of the organization’s business ecosystem.
The practice of architecture is performed at different levels within an organization and with different focuses (infrastructure, applications, and data) including business functions and strategies.
When these architecture models have governance, they enable all executives involved to have a clear view of the current state of their systems. From this they can create competitive innovation strategies considering physical and digital business models (phygital) and articulate new solutions and regulatory compliance issues. They can reach new levels of efficiency.
Competitiveness and innovation are directly related to the digital dexterity that your organization has and is objectively dependent on a data strategy that permeates the entire organization.
If your organization is not structured with people who have a broad view of data management, governance, competitiveness, and innovation, everything else is just fallacy. Strategy and data help organizations to drive innovation technology.
Does your organization know what data literacy is?