Data: The Competitive Advantage…. But only if you know what you want to do with it!

Big data means faster, better decision making and can lead to more efficient ways of doing business and supporting company growth ambitions.  It’s one of the buzzwords across the insurance industry along with analytics, data science, data lakes and many others. But often when you move outside of the IT department, the business becomes confused and many are unclear about what these terms mean and what the organisation data strategy actually is.  The one thing they are clear on is that they want data… and lots of it!

Analytical capability is key to success within the insurance industry and technology is an enabler to help achieve this, but the fundamental questions that data can answer are at the heart of this issue and are often forgotten.  If the business can’t articulate the questions they require the answers to, the IT departments will struggle to deliver a solution which meets their needs.  We’ve all worked on projects to streamline processes and centralise data within a system, and we’ve all worked on projects which have successfully achieved this, only to find out you can’t extract the data, the standard reporting is poor and will never deliver the decision making power the business requires.

So to become a true data driven organisation with competitive advantage, you need to understand how data supports better decision making and you need to be clear on what data your business needs.  Once you have clarity on the core data needs of your organisation, you then have to ensure the data you hold is of the right quality.  This is a challenge and requires data to be at the heart of an organisation’s culture.  Data isn’t just owned by the IT department, or the data quality team, it’s the basis of everything we do across a business and therefore ownership is across the organisation and we all have to take responsibility.

For further support on data strategy or data driven projects and change please contact [email protected] or [email protected].