As the leaves start to grow again and the weather warms up, what better time than now to do some much-needed spring cleaning of your data and insights practices?

In this edition of the Insights Beat, we dive into our Q1 research in data, analytics, and AI that highlights the best approach to get more value from your enterprise data, maintain high levels of maturity and competency across the insights-to-action lifecycle, and what to expect in the future.

Start Your Spring Cleaning With A Clear Strategy

It is first important to understand what direction you want to take your data strategy, and our template will guide you to build a solid plan. The data strategy template contains three parts to help you prepare (establish your data strategy roadmap), position (create your data success page), and present (communicate your data strategy). Don’t forget to couple that with a strong data governance approach that will set you up for cleaner and clearer data practices within your organization. It’s not unusual to see organizations on their third or fourth attempt at starting a data governance program — use the six steps we outline in the report to make your current efforts successful.

Keep Your Data (And Its Use) Organized

With data use becoming only more prevalent within enterprises, there has never been a greater need to improve the data literacy competency across your organization. Once your business has invested in a data foundation, start prioritizing an employee data literacy competency and get help with your data literacy programs to push toward becoming an insights-driven business. There are several specialist data literacy education and training providers, as well as programs that are product-agnostic offered by business-intelligence technology vendors, that you can consider. Another way to keep you data organized is to define your data governance processes and procedures to make data work in a trusted and secure way.

Apply Benefits In A Key Functional Area

With a data strategy in place and combining it with data literacy and governance practices, the work still does not end here. Reap the benefits of this by applying this work into a key functional area: customer experience and customer insights. Maintain a high level of competency and maturity across multiple dimensions of customer insights. To help with this, we have created a maturity assessment that details six competencies that need to be improved in order to become an insights-driven customer experience leader, and we have even created a roadmap for every competency level to help accelerate this.

What The Future Has In Store

Just as it is important to focus on what changes and improvements you can make to advance your business today, it is just as crucial to understand what to expect in the future. And with how quickly data and technology is growing, it has only become more difficult to stay on top of new platforms, technologies, and solutions that are on the way, whether it be to learn about upcoming data management technologies and solutions and what they will achieve or what the future of business intelligence holds and ways to further develop and deliver business insights in an efficient way.

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Note: A Forrester subscription is required to access the research featured and linked to in this post.

(Karsten Monteverde, research associate, coauthored this post.)