DATA STRATEGY
Connect your goals to measurable outcomes, enabling you to navigate change, optimize operations, stay agile, and outpace the competition
G4 partners with you to define a comprehensive data strategy, outlining where data can drive measurable business value. We unite your organization around a shared vision for making data securely accessible, easily reusable, and seamlessly embedded into operations.
Workstream 1: Build Consensus on Goals and Scope
Focus: Align stakeholders on strategic goals and the approach to defining your data strategy. We emphasize the importance of developing a holistic data strategy across all key functions because data is a team sport. Focusing on one area, such as finance or marketing, inevitably requires collaboration with other functions, making cross-functional inclusion essential for success.
Key Activities:
Educate stakeholders on how to leverage a use-case driven approach to create data value streams within business processes, highlighting successful examples and lessons learned from industry leaders
Establish a prioritization framework to guide decision-making as use cases are defined
Identify subject matter experts and colleagues to be included in the data strategy work, ensuring representation across critical business functions. Plan the kick-off to align participants on objectives, roles, and next steps
Workstream 2: Capture Current State Business Architecture
Focus: Evaluate current business processes to identify opportunities to embed AI and analytics solutions. This analysis uncovers short-term wins, foundational fixes, growth opportunities, operational efficiencies, and areas for innovation
Key Activities:
Map processes to their supporting technologies and data products to gain a clear view of the existing business architecture. Note: G4 utilizes its proprietary service blueprinting to document your business architecture
Identify and develop an “opportunity inventory” that highlights areas for data-driven value creation
Capture prioritization criteria with measurable success factors to assist in ranking use cases
Workstream 3: Future State Use Cases
Focus: Use the “opportunity inventory” to define use cases and scope major releases. Collaborate with stakeholders to establish clear priorities and define success across short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Define processes for capturing lessons learned and incorporating them into future delivery work, creating a flywheel effect that drives compounding business value.
Key Activities:
Document use cases leveraging the proven G4 Use Case Framework (use case -> release -> delivery cycle)
Create prototypes for early validation and develop a plan to iteratively refine solutions based on feedback
Develop high-level business architecture recommendations that link business processes, data, and technology solutions, with a focus on their features and functions, to ensure seamless implementation and adoption
At G4, we view business architecture as the foundation for setting the strategic direction - it’s your north star. Decisions on lower-level technology architectures, application/workload/delivery cycle architecture, are made during execution and aligned to your business architecture. If you engage us for execution, we design these lower-level architectures to enable successful delivery. We offer two “strategy execution” engagement options:
Data Infrastructure Projects, where our resources are managed by us, with our leaders collaborating closely with your teams
Enablement: Elastic Workforce, where our resources enhance your team's skillset and are managed directly by you
Workstream 4: Operating Model Design
Focus: Define roles, responsibilities, and structures to effectively manage your use case delivery. This will ensure alignment between business, governance, and technology teams to deliver value through seamless execution, efficient collaboration, and measurable outcomes.
Key Activities:
Assess and define roles, responsibilities, and processes across business, governance, and technology teams to improve accountability, responsibility, and alignment
Assess the delivery approach to ensure it supports optimal velocity, adaptability, and use case evolution
Provide recommendations for release management structures and support mechanisms to enable seamless execution and long-term scalability
Workstream 5: Vendor Assessments
Focus: G4 guides you through an unbiased evaluation of vendor solutions. This effort is typically led by technology and governance teams, with business stakeholders driving and validating requirements based on the features and functions defined in their use cases.
Key Activities
Identify evaluation criteria based on business, technology, and governance requirements
Collect, analyze, and compare vendor information, including capabilities, costs, scalability, and integration feasibility
Facilitate vendor demonstrations or proof of concepts to assess functionality and alignment with needs
Incorporate vendor solutions into future state business architecture