What is a Data Strategy?
Data strategy is a long term plan for managing your data and giving it its basic structure. An information strategy focuses on the integration of the data and the business process ensuring that you have the correct context. The data strategy focusses on supporting the transactional data. The first step is getting the data into a usable place and state – this is Data Provisioning. The second step is giving structure to the data which is the Master Data. Next, “information” about the data, ie, the Metadata must be provided. Last, efforts such as archiving, security, and partitioning should be included as part of the data strategy.
Separating the Data Strategy from the Information Strategy
The key reason that we separate Information Strategy and Data Strategy is to keep the right focus for each area. Once the Information Strategy is set the Architects can start the Data Strategy. Much of the Data Strategy is critical to the Information Strategy’s success but most of the consumers of the Information Strategy do not need to be involved in the Data Strategy. How the transactional data, master data or Metadata are physically handled should not matter to the users as long as it supports the information strategy. By separating the two we can have the business user focus on context and usability and the IT organization focus on structure and integration. Delivering an Information Strategy takes the entire organization, but often creating a separation helps each maintain focus.