The 'North Star' of Digital Transformation is a 'Data First' Strategy: HPE CEO

The “North Star” of digital transformation, according to Antonio Neri, president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is a “data first” strategy. Neri examines the need of aligning strategic, organizational, and technological decisions with the overarching goal of exploiting data as a strategic asset in a piece he wrote for the World Economic Forum Annual Conference. He references research showing that the average company had a data maturity score (the capacity to produce value from data) of only 2.6 out of 5. This suggests a lack of fundamental capacities for doing so, which in turn hinders firms’ capacity to create crucial results including increasing sales, innovating, expanding customer experience, increasing environmental sustainability, and raising humanitarian standards across their supply chains. Neri’s answer is to bridge this divide by achieving a high level of data maturity and strengthening control over that data leading to a new “digital divide” where companies who take a data first approach have a strong lead against competitors who are disconnected with the power of their data

With the ability to access, control, protect, govern, and unlock the value of data regardless of where it is generated or housed, he predicts that enterprises will emerge as data platforms in their own right. Neri advocates for decentralized, scalable data architectures that facilitate cross-organizational and cross-national sharing of data and analytics without compromising on privacy or control. To unlock the value from an organization’s data, Neri recommends several actions to start: defining a data strategy with clear objectives aligned with the organization’s overall goals, assigning strategic investments to data initiatives, appointing a senior-level data officer with accountability for the data strategy, creating an effective architecture to manage data end-to-end securely, and establishing the skills to master advanced analytics methodologies.

Source: weforum