Huge amounts of data flow into and through organisations on a daily basis. This data is the lifeblood of digital transformation, powering the tools, services and experiences that customers want and providing companies with a competitive advantage. So does every knowledge worker now need basic data analysis skills to do their job effectively?

Marcos Monteiro, chief executive of Veezoo, a natural language query-based platform described as “Siri for enterprises”, claims there is a growing divide between top-performing organisations that realise all employees need data analysis skills and those that don’t.

“Trends such as ‘growth hacking’ from Silicon Valley introduced the idea of building a data-native team to look for insights, experiment and find ways to grow the business faster,” he says. “However, what companies like Facebook, Airbnb and Slack have realised is that using analytics shouldn’t be limited to just data teams, it needs to be the de facto way of doing business and part of the company culture.”

This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a data scientist who can build predictive models, he explains, “but rather that if you democratise access to data through simple processes and intuitive solutions, it can bring huge benefits to the business”.

If somebody without the suitable data skills has open access to an expert, they can learn organically while also working towards project objectives

Pete Hanlon, chief technology officer at Moneypenny, an outsourced communications provider, believes that while not every knowledge worker is necessarily a data analyst, “all knowledge workers really need to understand the value, uses and responsibilities of an organisation’s data”. He adds that as data capture increases across all functions, “understanding the organisation’s responsibilities and risks become everyone's responsibility”.

It’s a good point. But how might employees react to this requirement for greater skills and sensitivity around data? “For those not accustomed to handling data, it would be easy to refute this as out of their job remit,” says Ashwini Bakshi, managing director for Europe and sub-Saharan Africa at the Project Management Institute (PMI). However, he believes it should instead be seen as “an opportunity to upskill ourselves and those around us”.

Gaining insight

A growing number of tools and platforms aim to help employees achieve this goal and make better use of data. “Previously, data was mostly kept in the hands of a few specialists who had the skills and understanding necessary to properly organise, crunch and interpret it for their organisation,” says Peter Jackson, chief data and analytics officer at Exasol, an analytics database provider.

“This approach was born out of necessity as the majority of business employees were not trained on how to effectively work with the growing flood of data. But with the emergence of technologies that make it easier to share, interpret and work with data across the board, things have now changed.”

Above all, these tools and technologies need to ensure that the right data is available to the right people at the right time. “For example, certain operational data needs to be as real time as possible to help make decisions during the day,” says Hanlon. “This helps us ensure that bottlenecks across our operations department are reduced before they become problems.”

Given that most people don't know how to use complex analytics tools, don't understand how data is structured and don’t know how to build queries, businesses also need to ensure people can access data insights in a variety of different ways, from standard reports and dashboards to ad hoc queries.

“What matters in the end is increasing the level of access and enabling people to interact more frequently with data to become more familiar with it,” says Monteiro. “When this happens, people start to grasp the true value of data, they are more motivated to maintain its quality and more likely to make better decisions.”

Natalie Cramp, chief executive of data science company Profusion, says the data different departments collect and hold must be centralised, accessible and, crucially, usable. “This is often an area that organisations fall down on,” she explains. “They spend heavily on a data team or wider data skills, but neglect the infrastructure needed to collect, channel and manage information. The result is a lot of wasted time cleaning the data and dealing with inaccurate, incomplete and inaccessible information.”

IT support

Caroline Carruthers, chief executive of data consultancy firm Carruthers and Jackson, believes there’s a lot more that IT can do to support an organisation than simply creating and integrating new tools and platforms.

“It’s important to note there’s already a wealth of tools and tech out there that can do pretty much anything our imagination wants us to do,” she says. “The next step is for IT teams to work with the rest of the organisation to understand what it wants to achieve and start thinking outside of the box to get the most out of the tools and tech they have.”

Some firms are looking to get more out of the data expertise they already have. For example, Bakshi says the PMI has seen an emerging trend of project teams breaking silos to include people from all areas of the business, from human resources and finance to IT, which can fuel knowledge-sharing. “If somebody without the suitable data skills has open access to an expert, they can learn organically while also working towards project objectives,” he says.

Hiring a chief data officer (CDO) who can take responsibility and ownership of the company’s data might also be a smart move for some businesses. “The CDO is one of the best-placed individuals to make data an integral part of the everyday life of an organisation and create opportunities to increase data literacy levels across the business,” says Jackson.

Ultimately, it seems greater data literacy is something all knowledge workers require. “Even if you’re just searching the internet or using social media, you need a basic level of data literacy to properly understand what you’re doing,” says Carruthers. “Organisations can help facilitate this by giving data literacy training and awareness to staff to help them understand there’s no need to fear data, and that if used correctly data can make life a lot easier.”

The way we work has changed immeasurably over the past year. Countless businesses have pivoted from office-based workplaces to company-wide remote working — a shift that might have taken years to plan and execute pre-pandemic.

While it hasn’t always been a smooth transition, businesses that have embraced digital transformation have found it easier to adapt to the new world of work.

Digital transformation without data is a bit like a car without fuel – it simply won’t work

In fact, digital transformation is now arguably essential for long-term survival. But to transform successfully and thrive, businesses also need to ensure they remain agile throughout the journey. And the foundation of this agility, and indeed digital transformation itself, is data.

“Digital transformation without data is a bit like a car without fuel – it simply won’t work,” says Caroline Carruthers, chief executive of data consultancy firm Carruthers and Jackson. As such, she believes problems typically occur when data and digital transformation are thought of as two separate areas. “These two go hand in hand and should be seen as two parts of the same whole journey for an organisation,” says Carruthers.

Clear objectives

For many businesses, the transformation journey can only properly begin once they have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. “Data is coming at us from all directions – our own IT systems, customers’ systems, partners, sales and so on – to the point that many firms are being overwhelmed by a data deluge,” says Dayne Turbitt, senior vice president and general manager at Dell Technologies UK.

He therefore believes that for data to truly power successful digital transformation, IT leaders must honestly reflect on their business objectives. “With that knowledge, they can extrapolate what data they will need to reduce and eventually automate tasks,” says Turbitt. “That can only lead to a reduction in cycle time to deploy new projects or features, ultimately resulting in a faster, more responsive business.”

Mohan Rajagopalan, vice president of product marketing at ServiceMax, which provides field service management solutions, believes data transformation is a key part of any digital transformation programme. “It’s an easy step to skip because clean data can often be an afterthought or an assumption and it will limit the ability to be agile during your digital transformation,” he says.

“Without a clean data set you have no idea where your data holes are. Once you identify those holes it becomes easier to fix and is a fundamental part of becoming, and more importantly remaining, agile as your digital transformation project progresses.” Even when businesses do have clean, real-time data, they still need to have the right technology, processes and culture to understand it. As such, Turbitt describes business transformation agility as a mindset rather than a destination, which data can help to shape. “Getting feedback from real users, for example, can quickly inform you of the data that you should be collecting,” he explains. “If the data isn’t there, that’s the hint to iterate on the design and pivot if necessary.”

Informed decisions

Responsibility for progress on digital transformation often lies with project managers, who can benefit from the insights that data provides.

“It is unrealistic to expect that a project manager can efficiently lead a team towards an objective without the suitable data, patterns and trends required to make quick, well-informed decisions throughout the process,” says Ashwini Bakshi, managing director for Europe and sub-Saharan Africa at the Project Management Institute. “With the right data, project managers can also ensure that their team’s processes and operations remain efficient, accurate and within the confines of their brief.”

He adds that in the right hands, in-depth data sets can easily be broken down for stakeholders and executives, giving them insight into the business impact and return on investment on every project, something that can help them plan future initiatives and make critical strategic decisions.

Ramyani Basu, partner and UK lead for the digital transformation practice at the consulting firm Kearney, also believes that being able to translate raw data into actionable insights is a “powerful tool” in the armoury of business leaders. But to unlock these insights, companies need to “think data, build data and scale data”, she says.

“Firstly, think data is about identifying the greatest value from data in their business. Then they must build data, which means prioritising the deployment of new data capabilities that target the greatest areas of value. Finally, scale data, which means putting in place the teams, skills, operating model and culture to power best use of data across the organisation,” says Basu. None of this is simple, she concedes, “but winners in the market are getting on the front foot and doing it fast”.

To unlock insights and remain agile during their transformation journey, some firms are turning to data-as-a-service models. “By freeing up capacity, organisations may quickly scale to changing data volumes and demands,” says Turbitt. “We saw this approach work at the start of the pandemic with cloud technology. Businesses looking for increased cloud services were able to scale quickly with the as-a-service public cloud model. Data as a service is that model applied differently but with the same result: business transformation agility.”

Businesses are well aware of the power of data. In almost every industry, countless organisations are using it to become more efficient, deliver better services and gain a competitive edge over their rivals. But to unlock the value hidden in your data, you first need to know where it enters your organisation, how it’s processed and shared, and who needs access to it. Only then can you start to draw meaningful and trustworthy insights from it.

Achieving this isn’t easy. Data that could be hugely valuable to one function may be locked in the systems of another or stored in a format that limits its usability. Add in the fact that organisations are generating more and more data each day and it’s easy to see how data challenges can quickly get out of hand. But if chief information officers (CIOs) follow these five steps, they’ll have a much better chance of overcoming them and achieving true data empowerment.

1. Bring relevant stakeholders together

In almost every business, employees are using the insights data provides to improve their decision-making processes. Some may only need to do so in a relatively limited sense but others, such as data scientists or analysts, cannot do their job without access to high-quality data.

Ensuring everyone can access the data they need, when they need it, is therefore a vital part of every CIO’s role. What’s more, everyone who comes into contact with the organisation’s data should also know how to view, share and secure it properly.

This is an educational issue as much as a technological one. So while a platform that allows different departments and employees to easily update, share and analyse the data flowing into the organisation is vital, it’s equally important to ensure every employee knows how to make use of these tools successfully.

Alignment on these issues across different departments can help to ensure that data is fully accessible to all. This in turn makes it easier for organisations to build inclusive cross-functional initiatives on the back of their data, as every stakeholder should have the tools and the skillset to contribute in a meaningful way.

2. Know where your data is and who can access it

Cyberattacks are increasing in scale and sophistication. This surge in criminal activity is happening against a backdrop of ever-stricter data protection regulations. So a large-scale breach can easily result in severe financial and reputational repercussions for the victim.

This means it’s essential to have full oversight of where your data is stored, including whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, who can access it and when access is no longer required. The CIO’s deep knowledge of both their company’s IT infrastructure and its data regulatory responsibilities means they are typically responsible for achieving this. In other words, when it comes to data security the buck often stops with the CIO.

Putting in place robust data access and retention policies will reduce the risk of data breaches and any accompanying financial and reputational damage. Data discovery and classification tools can also help them to identify acutely sensitive data and target resources accordingly. But it’s important not to forget the human element and company-wide awareness of the importance of data security.

3. Gain the best insight from available data

To provide valuable strategic insights, data must firstly be clean and comprehensive. Duplicate and outdated records need to be removed, and data profiling and categorisation carried out so the data can easily be retrieved, sorted, stored and analysed. Otherwise, the quality of the insights it provides, and any subsequent decisions based on them, could be compromised.

With the right systems in place, organisations can also unlock the power of real-time data. This ensures your people are always working with the very latest information rather than information which may already be out of date, something that’s increasingly vital in a fast-paced business landscape.

But to truly unlock the power of real-time insights, CIOs should encourage employees to move beyond a mindset that sees data as little more than fuel for weekly or monthly reports and instead make use of real-time dashboards and other analysis tools. They, and other senior leaders, must therefore ensure everyone understands the benefits of these tools, how they apply to their role and if necessary provide training in how to use them effectively.

4. Enable timely use of data

Upgrading legacy systems to enable real-time data insights is a task that requires considerable time and money, as well as strong leadership, to see through to completion. However, organisations lumbered with legacy systems can still enable the timely use of data through an open architecture.

This approach allows for the introduction of application programming interfaces (APIs) that can interface with data from other systems and support real-time data-driven insights, even if the systems these APIs are interfacing with are legacy ones.

As IT infrastructures become more complex, CIOs and their teams must ensure their organisation’s data infrastructure – the pipeline through which data flows across the organisation – is subject to constant automated monitoring. This can be a big challenge, but once the right tools are in place, the business will be able to proactively identify, investigate and address problems before they disrupt timely access to data.

5. Build proof that data is of consistently high quality

CIOs must have visibility into all the users and endpoints that have access to their organisation’s data, which in turn allows them to put comprehensive procedures in place to protect data sources from unauthorised access. Only then can everyone be truly confident the data they are using and analysing is accurate.

Information chiefs and the wider leadership team need to ensure everyone in the organisation understands how to interpret data properly and use it effectively. To achieve this, they may need to document the processes people should follow and ensure they’re up to speed with them. Otherwise, you can’t really be certain the right data is being used in the right way.

All this falls under the banner of a comprehensive data governance programme, which should be led at C-level and include clear protocols on data lineage. In other words, if someone in the organisation creates a visualisation based on either recent or historical data, they should be able to find out exactly where that data originates from, how it was brought into the company and whether it’s stored on-premise or in the cloud.

Chief information officers (CIOs) sit at the centre of virtually every major business initiative in today’s digital economy.

A recent survey confirms that European CIOs are at the heart of business decision-making. It found at least three-quarters of CIOs say that within the last twelve months, their role has expanded, their responsibilities have increased, and that they have greater influence on leadership decisions in their organisation.

This includes expanding to shape the customer experience. Customer perception of a brand often hinges on whether they can deliver on a seamless user experience. As such, IT leaders are now tasked with safeguarding brand reputation and loyalty by delivering on productivity and efficiency.

CIOs need to be looking at not just the technology, but how that technology truly drives the business top and bottom lines

“The CIO will report directly to the CEO and have their ear and confidence, helping them prepare for the uncertainty of the years ahead,” says Tony Gregg, chief executive at executive search firm, Anthony Gregg Partnership. “They will lead all the business critical initiatives and have touch points within all areas of a business. The CIOs create a new level of engagement with the customer or consumer.”

Subsequently, in today’s digital-first world the CIO role is beginning to replicate that of a chief customer officer (CCO) or customer success officer (CSO). In fact, the research confirms that CIOs have become the enablers of their company’s customer experience, with 67% saying managing customer experiences is now a primary priority of their job, despite all their other responsibilities.

Data is the key to customer engagement

One reason the CIO has come the lynchpin of an organisation’s customer experience is because, at its core, strong customer engagement is driven by data and effective analytics, of which the CIO is at the helm.

“Data is everything. To make a medical comparison, how can a doctor diagnose your ailments if the doctor can’t run any tests to understand what the current state or baseline is?” says Dean Leung, former CIO of a major legal firm who is now chief customer success officer at document and email management application iManage.

“As they make any changes, they need to know whether that's driving the desired outcome in the right direction. Data guides those decisions, and it’s the same for a CIO.”

Using technology, the CIO can lead the creation of a next generation customer experience, agrees Claire Dickson, group CIO at multinational packaging business, DS Smith.

“Using data, the customer journey can be measured every step of the way, creating evidence of likes and dislikes, and therefore how to pivot an offer, product or approach, to cross-sell or up-sell, and improve the customer offer and experience.”

They can achieve this “through AI-enabled platforms which track customer behaviour and adjust in real time, continually learning about a customer’s needs, pivoting to new experiences and loyalty offers. A data-led approach to always delighting the customer, of course with a focus on cyber security and protecting customer information, enables the CIO to effectively work hand in hand with the CSO.”

Extending responsibility for data-delivered experiences

Interestingly, Ash Jokhoo, chief data & information officer at Virgin Atlantic says responsibility for leveraging data to deliver customer outcomes should extend beyond the CIO to the entire leadership team.

“Ensuring there is real access, understanding and no fear in how to use data at work is the responsibility of all our leaders, not just the CIO,” he says. “[At Virgin Atlantic] it started with admitting where the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses are and then doing a few bold things every year to move things forward. It is a continuum, started by our CEO and now owned by the entire leadership team and wider. I happen to steward data, the forums and the architectures to enable it for our business. Nothing more.”

Driving the business

Leung adds: “Successful CIOs have always known that you implement technology to drive the business, and the business bottom line is efficiency, productivity, and revenue generation – rather than mandating the latest version for technology’s sake.

“I think there’s increasing recognition that CIOs need to be looking at not just the technology, but how that that technology truly drives the business top and bottom lines.”

Indeed, organisations today increasingly realise that they can achieve the best outcomes for the customer by working across disciplinary teams. And while the customer journey is more complex, with multiple touchpoints and channels, the CIO recognises that the data generated also provides opportunities to connect with customers and deliver seamless, personalised experiences.

As guardian of data-driven initiatives, the responsibility for ensuring an exceptional customer experience will increasingly lie with the CIO.