Three Data Strategies for Three Industries, in One Year
Three director-level data departments established inside client organisations; multi-million-pound business impact across the three engagements.
Theme Strategy, Vision & Transformation · Also Scaling
In brief
Situation. Three large UK enterprises, one in automotive, one in healthcare, one in FMCG, each wanted to become data-driven. Each had the budget, the appetite, and the C-suite mandate.
Complication. The phrase “data-driven” had been used in three different boardrooms to mean three different things. Each company had different industry constraints, different existing data maturity, and different cultural starting points. A copy-paste strategy from one to another would have failed all three.
Resolution. I led the development of comprehensive, tailored data strategies for each client. Every strategy established four enabling functions: infrastructure and data processing; data governance and compliance; data product and AI development; and data culture training and change management. I built detailed roadmaps for data hunting, ingestion, transformation, team building, and data utilisation, customised to each industry.
Impact. Each strategy led to the establishment of new director-level data departments inside the client organisation. Execution phase produced multiple data-centric projects and AI algorithms, some under my direct supervision. The accelerated digital transformation yielded millions of pounds of business impact across the three.
The longer story
Strategies fail for one of two reasons. Either they are too generic to be useful, or they are too specific to be implemented. Generic strategies sound smart and do nothing; specific strategies sound dull and get followed.
The trick is to know which audience needs which voice. The automotive client did not need to hear about FMCG-style customer analytics; they needed to hear about supply chain and warranty data. The healthcare client did not need to hear about consumer personalisation; they needed to hear about clinical data governance. The FMCG client did need to hear about consumer analytics, but in their industry’s language: shoppers, channels, shelf.
Same four pillars in all three cases. Three completely different conversations.
The reason the strategies got executed, and not just printed, was that each one read as though it had been written for that specific company, by someone who actually understood their world. Which it had been.