Gartner Build A Data Driven Enterprise August 2019

20/08/2019 Gartner Reprint
Licensed for Distribution
Build a Data-Driven Enterprise

Published 8 August 2018 - ID G00348390 - 20 min read
By Analysts Mike Rollings, Andrew White
Building a data-driven enterprise is not just about encouraging the use of data in decision-
making. Data and analytics leaders must lead development of the correct competencies and
rebalance work to be consistent with their enterprise's ambitions for generating information
value.
Overview
Key Challenges
■ Digital business thrives on data and the analysis of data, yet many enterprises find their
ambitions inhibited by their earlier behaviors. They treated data and analytics as supportive and
secondary to their business initiatives.
■ Many enterprises lack an organizational focus on data and analytics. Many still have not named
an executive to be responsible for the optimization of data and analytics and the development
of related enterprise competencies.
■ Data and analytics organizations have traditionally focused on delivering services for projects
rather than building and distributing enterprisewide competencies. They should instead foster
communities of practice and try to collaborate to achieve the results they desire.
Recommendations
To create a data and analytics program in line with the enterprise’s data-driven ambitions, data and
analytics leaders, especially CDOs, must:
■ Create a vision of a data-driven enterprise that makes sense to your peers. Provide a context to
change the organization’s operating model by identifying and prioritizing information-based
outcomes, such as monetizing data assets, establishing data governance and improving
decision-making capabilities through data analytics.
■ Ensure that authority and accountability for data and analytics are not out of balance with the
enterprise's data-driven ambitions. Work with enterprise executives to clarify your expectations
and justify a data and analytics leadership role if it does not exist.
■ Create a plan that accounts for data and analytics competency gaps, the degree of competency
building needed, and how competencies should be diffused through the enterprise for your
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enterprise vision to succeed.
Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2022, 30% of leading organizations will formally adopt infonomics practices and value their
information assets, maintaining a balance sheet for internal purposes.
By 2020, 80% of organizations will initiate deliberate competency development in the field of data
literacy, acknowledging their extreme deficiency.
By 2020, 25% of large organizations will be either sellers or buyers of data via formal online data
marketplaces.
Introduction
Today, the potential for data-driven business strategies and information products is greater than
ever. For some enterprises, data and analytics have become a primary driver of their business
strategy. It is a part of everything they do. These enterprises ask themselves different questions,
such as:
“With this data, or this type of insight, how could we fundamentally change the value propositions
for our customers?”
“How can we deliver new value propositions?”
Conceiving and answering these types of questions requires an expanded set of data and
analytics competencies as well as an organization that embraces data literacy. It is not just the
data and analytics organization, but the entire enterprise that gets involved. Data and analytics
success over competitors requires a much more expansive role for data and analytics in business
value generation. It requires executives to weave data and analytics into everything their
organizations do. This is not a simple exercise.
In a data-driven enterprise, data and analytics are no longer afterthoughts — they are fundamental
to digital business transformation. Yet the ability to “think in data” is difficult for most enterprises.
Most organizations are unaccustomed to thinking about or working with data while performing
analyses (other than digital natives). Gartner predicts that by 2020, 80% of organizations will
initiate deliberate competency development in the field of data literacy, acknowledging their
extreme deficiency. Increasingly, organizations are realizing this and beginning to look at data and
analytics in a new way.
Data and analytics are becoming a primary driver of value generation and business strategy for
data-driven organizations (see “Survey Analysis: Where to Target Your Data and Analytics
Investments to Improve Business Value”). This profoundly impacts the work of a data and
analytics organization and the enterprise competencies that must be built. It potentially changes
the management ethos of the organization, such as the role of the centralized function (see Figure
1).
Figure 1. Data and Analytics Competencies for a Data-Driven Organization
Source: Gartner (August 2018)
It is nothing short of a transformation driven by a desire to find new ways to maximize the value of
the enterprise's data and analytic assets. As data and analytics leader, you must help your
organization realize the heights of the opportunities and the depths of the challenges, and account
for the myriad of work required.
Analysis
Develop Your Data-Driven Ambition
Organizations that struggle with digital business transformation likely also struggle with becoming
data-driven — and they may not realize it!
Gartner defines a digital business as an organization — or a unit inside an organization — whose

product set and business model are only made possible by the use of information and digital
technology. 1 A digital business cannot exist without data and analytics.
Consider the important step on the journey to becoming a successful digital business: developing
your enterprise's digital ambition (see “Digital Business Ambition: Transform or Optimize?”).
Enterprises are encouraged to start developing their ambition by considering whether they should
optimize the existing business model or introduce new business models and revenue sources
(see Figure 2). Data and analytics are important to each digital business opportunity, but if your
enterprise is having trouble conceiving and executing your digital ambition, perhaps you should
start with your data.
Figure 2. Your Digital Business Ambition: Optimization vs. Transformation
The ability to explore opportunities from multiple perspectives during strategy work is essential to
uncover your enterprise’s ambition. For example, executives must possess strategy skills to
conclude that the business outcomes highlighted in Figure 2 — “optimize inventory and yield” and
“contract based on shared risk and outcome” — are priorities. However, those priorities will remain
aspirational if you don’t articulate the data and analytic dependencies — data sources, data quality
issues, types of analysis and new work practices — needed to use those insights. But data-driven
organizations with the aid of infonomics can fully uncover their opportunities by starting with their
data and analytic assets — for example, uncovering that there is unreleased value in your sales
and inventory data assets, and how combining those with IoT-enabled inventory tracking data may
further inventory optimization.
Infocentric enterprises that are successful with infonomics yield market-

to-book values far above the norm. 2
Work with executives to define your data-driven ambitions:
■ Apply the value, information and analytics (VIA) model and to identity opportunities. Explore
opportunities from the information and analytics perspectives in addition to the value
perspective (see Figure 3, “Toolkit: Enabling Data Literacy and Information as a Second
Language” and “No Data and Analytics Vision? No Business Impact!”).
■ Utilize the methods discussed in “Toolkit: Use Gartner's Value Pyramid to Connect Data to
Business Value” to identify data and analytics initiatives that relate to important key
performance measures.
■ Apply infonomics to know what information you have or could get, specific sources to leverage
and its monetizable characteristics (see “Essential Product Management Practices to Monetize
3
Data and Analytics Assets”).
■ Use examples from industries outside your own that you can reapply to your situation (see
“Toolkit: Analytics Business Opportunities From Almost 200 Use Cases”).
Figure 3. Exploring Data-Driven Opportunities From Multiple Perspectives
Base your ambitions on the best opportunities. These opportunities will likely cross organizational
boundaries and form the context for operating model changes.
Align Executive Responsibility With Enterprise Ambition
Becoming data-driven is having a profound impact on how to organize to maximize return from
data and analytic assets. It is also challenging long-standing notions of hands-off or arm’s-length
management policies. For most organizations, data and analytics is included with other
technology management activities, and includes data management, enabling application
development, reporting and data warehousing.
Many enterprises face a major shift when they consider their data-driven ambitions. This shift
does not simply change the allocation of work; it changes the nature of their business and the
nature of work related to data and analytics. Because data and analytics must be woven into
everything you do, related competencies diffuse throughout the organization
This shift potentially impacts your business model, many or all of your business model
components, and even how you first organized your enterprise (see “A Chief Data Officer's Guide
to an AI Strategy” for an approach to conduct business model analysis). For instance, if you have a
single value chain in your enterprise, becoming data-driven formally recognizes “information
management and intelligence” as a separate activity from “technology management.” Michael
Porter's original value chain model 4 bundled information into “technology management” — a term
that doesn't adequately recognize the importance of data and analytics to a modern enterprise.
When considered separately from technology, it forces you to rethink organizing principles to
maximize the value of your key data and analytic assets — for example, information management
activity autonomy of business areas.
In all but the simplest organizations (for instance, with a board of directors and one CEO, CFO and
other top executives), this shift may result in some major changes. It may change the role of the
topmost management layer (the role of the center) and decision authorities. For example, you may
determine that certain information or intelligence is now a key resource across several once-
independent business areas. Such decisions will impact your fundamental operating model and
likely change long-held assumptions.
Example: A Shifting Operating Model

Imagine a holding company that owns many insurance companies. The once “hands-off” principle —
being fully autonomous in all but finances — is now challenged by a desire to use the claims data of
the holdings. If the company wants to develop intelligence about treatments and practices to help
injury claimants return to work more quickly, it can no longer be hands-off about data at the holding
company level.
Just like CFOs consolidating treasury management across all business units, you together with
business executives must implement the data governance and business philosophy changes
necessary to pursue data opportunities spanning multiple business units/departments. Change
the role of the center from “hands-off” to one of value management and value generation,
consistent with your vision. This is not centralization, but instead creating a needed competency
center for a recognized value source.
As the senior most data and analytics leader, such as a chief data officer (CDO), ensure that you
are assigned responsibility for the maximization of data and analytics value and the development
of essential data competencies (see “Business Case for the Chief Data Officer” and “Why Midsize
Enterprises Need a Chief Data Officer”). Also ensure that your authority and accountability
matches the organizational reach stipulated by your vision. If your organization does not have this
executive CDO role, justify one. Create a new executive position at the proper reporting level to
oversee all initiatives related to data and analytics.
At a minimum, this CDO role should be responsible for:
■ Building the critical foundations of a data-driven enterprise
■ Fostering information governance as a strategic discipline
■ Leading data and analytics strategy
■ Defining and executing the data and analytics program via a hybrid model with centralized and
distributed resources
■ Fostering data literacy and a data-driven culture
■ Developing data and analytics organizational skills and competencies
Further details of the role can be found in “Toolkit: Chief Data Officer Job Description” and “Chief
Data Officers' Handbook.”
Identify Competency Gaps and How to Close Them Collaboratively

A modern data and analytics organization enables both centralized and decentralized work while
creating a center of gravity for critical competencies, consistency and collaboration. Technical
skills may be scarce within data and analytics teams, and line-of-business users may require a
brand new type of analytical mindset and skills, especially in self-service analytics use cases.
Enabling both producers (analysts) and consumers (business, self-service usage) requires
collaboration, as well as effective and ongoing training programs.
A hybrid model is essential. A totally centralized approach tends to be too slow, overbearing and
lacking in business domain expertise; a totally decentralized approach struggles to deliver
consistency and achieve cross-business-unit collaboration. The work must be split between
centralized and decentralized functions to achieve the best possible outcomes. The central
functions must foster the development of competencies — the mix of skills, knowledge and
abilities that are necessary for enterprise data-driven objectives. This ensures that both near- and
long-term needs are being met.
The centralized function:
■ Provides overall program definition and operation
■ Builds enterprisewide competencies
■ Delivers services to those that cannot meet their own demand
■ Collaborates to improve results and build communities
Centralized: Office of the CDO

Using this approach, the office of the CDO is responsible for program definition and operation, and
for structuring all data and analytics initiatives based on a business-led program tied to business
outcomes. Joining up enterprise activities related to data and analytics into a program is an
essential part of managing and communicating business value delivery (see “2017 Strategic
Roadmap for Enterprise Information Management” and “Effective Communication and Influence
Strategies for Data and Analytics Leaders”).
The office of the CDO should develop core data and analytics competencies (see Table 1, which
elaborates Figure 1), and have both enterprise accountability and responsibility. Identify those
competencies that are lacking but essential to your vision, and work with business executives to
fund, establish or improve them.
Table 1: Work of the Office of the CDO

Work
Description and Related Research
Performed
Information The emerging concept of “infonomics” contends that information is an asset in its
value own right, as it has value and substance. Information value management is the
management emerging discipline to formally manage, leverage and quantify information value
with the same discipline as actual balance sheet assets.
See:
“Maverick* Research: The Birth of Infonomics, the New Economics of Information”
“Why and How to Measure the Value of Your Information Assets”
“7 Steps to Create Persistent Data Value”
Data-driven Data and analytics leaders are uniquely positioned to identify opportunities for
strategy creating new data-driven business models that leverage advanced analytics for
market differentiation. The strategy development processes and practices of the
enterprise must become infused with the examination of data and analytics
opportunities.
See:
“Use the Gartner Data and Analytics Compass to Drive Strategy”
Work
Performed
Enterprise Data literacy is the ability to read, write and communicate data in context. Data
data literacy literacy also includes:
■ An understanding of data sources and constructs
■ The analytical methods and techniques applied
■ The ability to describe the use-case application and resulting value
Data and analytics leaders must design and execute programs of data literacy
education to raise levels of data literacy, improve data and analytics skills, and drive
the organization’s capability and capacity to “speak data.”
See:
“Toolkit: Enabling Data Literacy and Information as a Second Language”
“How CDOs Engage With Their Stakeholders to Foster Data Literacy and Deliver
Measurable Business Value”
“How to Design an Effective Training Program for Analytics Skills”
Data science Data science is the discipline of extracting nontrivial knowledge from all kinds of
data to improve decision making. It involves a variety of steps, ranging from
business understanding and data preparation to building and deploying analytic
models.
It is, to some extent, a replacement term for data mining, but is also much more:
data science is the unification of several quantitative disciplines — statistics,
machine learning, operations research, computational linguistics and others.
Advanced analytics depends on the development of these different disciplines,
which are united behind the banner of data science.
See:
“Maximize the Value of Your Data Science Efforts by Empowering Citizen Data
Scientists”
Data sourcing Data sourcing covers the practices associated with managing data acquisition and
licensing (with procurement teams), and creating and maintaining strategic sourcing
relationships with third-party data brokers. It models other sourcing best practices
to be the enterprise clearinghouse for external data, and works with other functions
to ensure data brokers comply with existing rules and regulations.
See:
“Managing External Sources of Business Information: It Is Time for a Makeover”
“Predicts 2017: Licensing, Legal and Language Lessons for Data and Analytics
Leaders”
“Understand the Data Brokerage Market Before Choosing a Provider”
“Toolkit: How to Evaluate the Quality of Data From Data Brokers or Other Third
Parties”
Work
Performed
Information Information governance is the specification of decision rights and an accountability

governance framework to ensure appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use,
archiving and deletion of information. It includes processes, roles, policies,
standards and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information, as
well as contextual use considerations such as ethics, security and privacy.
It also includes the creation of life cycle management plans that reflect the
company's legal and regulatory obligations (such as handling electronic and
physical documents and records, and auditing records management policy for
compliance and enforcement).
See:
“Design an Effective Information Governance Strategy”
“Establish a Framework for Analytics Governance”
“Reset Your Information Governance Approach by Moving From Truth to Trust”
Information Information architecture — aka enterprise information architecture (EIA) — refers to

architecture the enterprise architecture (EA) activities that define a company’s business
information assets (as well as the assets’ sources, structure, classification and
associations).
Information architecture enables understanding and utilizing enterprise data and
analytic assets to achieve desired business outcomes.
See:
“Toolkit: The Information Architect’s Playbooks for EIM”
Use case Facilitating the exploration of data-driven opportunities and serving as an enterprise
curation and clearinghouse for both implemented and potential data and analytics use cases is a
exploration core enabler of agility. This core competency helps business units understand the
potential and limitations of various types of analytics, along with identifying,
evaluating and prototyping candidate projects.
See:
“Data-Centric Facilitators Are Crucial for Enabling Data Literacy in Digital Business”
Decentralized: Shared Work and Competencies

Decentralized teams in business areas are an essential part of delivering data and analytics with
the domain expertise and responsiveness to meet demand for a given business area. Yet, most
organizations do not adequately distribute responsibility for the full set of shared work and
competencies (see Table 2, which further elaborates Figure 1). This creates gaps in consistency
and responsibility. While the office of the CDO develops the overall enterprise capacity to perform
the competencies in Table 2, the responsibility is diffused across the enterprise based on the
necessary allocation of work between the distributed team and the center.
Table 2: Enterprise Shared Work and Competencies
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Shared
Work and Description and Related Research
Competency
Information An emerging discipline that takes cues from the set of generally accepted
asset accounting principles (GAAP) and applies them to frame a standard for
management information asset management. This well-established accounting framework
includes a set of principles based upon basic assumptions and tempered by a set
of constraints. Although GAAP provides guidance for preparing financial
statements, the framework itself provides a useful way to express a concise set of
generally accepted information principles that promote the treatment of
information as a true asset.
See:
“Generally Accepted Information Principles for Improved Information Asset
Management”
Data The longstanding discipline of data management can be performed across many
management groups within an enterprise. Every data and analytics use case, regardless of the
approach and business goals, requires the following data management
capabilities:
■ Describe: Collect knowledge about data assets, including where they are, what
format they are in, what level of quality they represent and their potential value
to the enterprise.
■ Organize: Align and structure data assets so that they can be readily found and
easily consumed by other use cases.
■ Integrate: Support accessing and ingesting diverse data types, performing

transformations and allowing independently designed data structures to be
used together toward a common objective.
■ Share: Make data available to consumption points.
■ Govern: Provide for risk assessment, control and compliance as it relates to

data quality, security, privacy and retention.
■ Implement: Support the deployment and execution of the other five capability
types.
See:
“Modern Data Management Requires a Balance Between Collecting Data and
Connecting to Data”
Shared
Competency
Analytics Analytics work — varying in degree from reporting to predictive and prescriptive
analytics along with other advanced techniques — is distributed across an
enterprise based on the needs of any given business domain. Analytics work can
generally be described by the following process steps of analytic workflows:
■ Identify and understand the business objectives, issues and key questions.
■ Acquire data, including identifying and getting access to required data sources.
■ Store and transform the data into data models that can be analyzed.
■ Process the data and apply analytic methods, algorithms and rules.
■ Investigate the developed insight and present as data visualizations.
■ Review and interpret the insight gained.
■ Execute the required actions; align with the business objectives.
(Note: The way these workflows are applied can vary for different functions)
See:
“Use Analytic Business Processes to Drive Business Performance”
“How to Be Agile With Business Analytics”
“Organizational Principles for Placing Data Science and Machine Learning Teams”
Information Information stewardship represents the enforcement of information governance

stewardship policies and rules. It is a role that is established within the line of business — not
IT. Information stewards work in support of the information governance program.
The work is focused on problem solving and dealing with governance exceptions.
See:
“A Day in the Life of an Information Steward”
“How Chief Data Officers Can Help Their Information Stewards”
“The Emergence of Information Stewardship Applications for Master Data”
Shared
Competency
Information This is a specialization of classic product management for information products —

product an offering that directly monetizes data by generating revenue or other financial
management benefits from exchanging it. It includes the licensing or bartering of data and/or
insights that are either:
■ Proprietary in nature
■ A by-product of business operations
■ Harvested via instrumentation of physical products and services
■ A combination of proprietary and exogenous data
Information product management responsibilities, such as product pricing and

licensing, market definition and product development, are likely to be within both
the office of the CDO and existing product management teams.
See:
“Essential Product Management Practices to Monetize Data and Analytics Assets”
As data and analytics leader, you should account for the competencies and types of work missing
from your enterprise by evaluating yourself against the competency models in Table 1 and Table
2. Examine the skills and competencies of delivery resources in both the center and distributed
teams to identify competency gaps, and develop activities necessary to close them. Allocate work
between the center and teams in business areas while ensuring that expected responsibilities are
clearly defined.
Evidence
1
“Four Definitions Make a Digital Business Strategy Process More Effective”
2
For more on infonomics, see “Maverick* Research: The Birth of Infonomics, the New Economics
of Information” or visit the Infonomics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infonomics) Wikipedia page
for additional articles on information value.
3
For more on the approach to value information assets, see “Why and How to Measure the Value
of Your Information Assets” and for more on the prediction about infonomics adoption see
“Predicts 2018: Five Course-Altering Changes for Data and Analytics Programs.”
4
See “Value Chain,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain) Wikipedia.
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20/08/2019 Gartner Reprint

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Build a Data-Driven Enterprise

enterprise vision to succeed.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

“How can we deliver new value propositions?”

Figure 1. Data and Analytics Competencies for a Data-Driven Organization

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Gartner deﬁnes a digital business as an organization — or a unit inside an organization — whose

Figure 2. Your Digital Business Ambition: Optimization vs. Transformation

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Infocentric enterprises that are successful with infonomics yield market-

Work with executives to deﬁne your data-driven ambitions:

Figure 3. Exploring Data-Driven Opportunities From Multiple Perspectives

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Align Executive Responsibility With Enterprise Ambition

Example: A Shifting Operating Model

At a minimum, this CDO role should be responsible for:

■ Building the critical foundations of a data-driven enterprise

■ Fostering information governance as a strategic discipline

■ Leading data and analytics strategy

■ Fostering data literacy and a data-driven culture

■ Developing data and analytics organizational skills and competencies

Identify Competency Gaps and How to Close Them Collaboratively

The centralized function:

■ Provides overall program deﬁnition and operation

■ Builds enterprisewide competencies

■ Delivers services to those that cannot meet their own demand

■ Collaborates to improve results and build communities

Centralized: Office of the CDO

Table 1: Work of the Office of the CDO

■ The analytical methods and techniques applied

■ The ability to describe the use-case application and resulting value

Information Information governance is the speciﬁcation of decision rights and an accountability

Information Information architecture — aka enterprise information architecture (EIA) — refers to

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

Decentralized: Shared Work and Competencies

Table 2: Enterprise Shared Work and Competencies

■ Integrate: Support accessing and ingesting diverse data types, performing

■ Share: Make data available to consumption points.

■ Govern: Provide for risk assessment, control and compliance as it relates to

■ Investigate the developed insight and present as data visualizations.

■ Review and interpret the insight gained.

■ Execute the required actions; align with the business objectives.

Information Information stewardship represents the enforcement of information governance

Information This is a specialization of classic product management for information products —

■ A by-product of business operations

■ Harvested via instrumentation of physical products and services

■ A combination of proprietary and exogenous data

Information product management responsibilities, such as product pricing and

Source: Gartner (August 2018)

© 2018 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

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