Introduction
This playbook provides a guide on how to embark on a data transformation journey in your organisation by sharing broad strategies that enable data transformation. While the learnings were formulated from transformation efforts within a Government context, we believe that these strategies will also be useful for private companies and organisations, large or small.
Contents Of Playbook
Every organisation wanting to compete and emerge stronger in the modern era needs to go digital, and data transformation is at the heart of it. Data is increasingly recognized as a critical enterprise asset and analytics skillsets have become essential competencies for staff. It is against this backdrop that organisations are under increasing pressure to transform and create a digital workforce that can harness the power of data to improve all aspects of the business.
While many organisations have embarked on some form of data transformation, not many have enjoyed holistic success. A successful data transformation is not just about overcoming technology problems, but it requires careful planning and execution to address policy issues, overcome cultural aversion to change and rally the people along. According to a case study published in Gartner, culture is a critical challenge to the success of data transformation with 75% of the CDOs citing human factors such as low data skills, low data literacy or cultural issues as impediments to data-driven decision making.
This playbook will cover the strategies undertaken to build up a modern, digitalised and data-driven organisation. It will guide you to:
- Build the right organisation structure to best effect change
- Upskill staff to the right level of training relevant for their role
- Develop organisation-wide system infra and tools for analytics work
- Build up a strong data culture
- Embark on strategic mission-critical data projects while supporting bottom-up projects
Powerful data products, platforms and expertise in the industry can work for and against an organisation’s digitalization efforts. Without an ability to grasp what is essential and what should come first, some run the risk of being overly ambitious by over-committing to infrastructure in data capabilities, simply relying on experts to ‘transform the company’ or over-training all their staff. It is important to have a good understanding of the unique traits of their own organisation before rolling out data transformation strategies.
To guide the Public Service to be ‘data-driven to the core’, the Smart Nation Digital Government Office (SNDGO) has set out the Government Data Strategy (GDS) that guides this vision. One of the key thrusts - Building capabilities and democratising use - requires officers to be data literate in this digital climate. Data is the common denominator in all the digital systems that we are moving to adopt and this can range from sensors, robots, cloud technologies and collaboration systems. Knowledge of how to derive insights through data science and artificial intelligence is key to fully utilise Government data for policy analysis, ops and service delivery.
