A Data Strategy: Theory vs. Practice

The idea to write this article was triggered by the remark of one of the participants of my strategy workshop last summer. He mentioned that it would be nice to include the consideration of real data strategies in the workshop. I thought it would be “the mission impossible.” Many companies started dealing with data as their strategic assets. So, a data strategy and data management practices could be considered a competitive advantage and kept confidential.

So, when preparing a new workshop on integrating data and metadata strategies, I recalled this remark and started searching for examples of data strategies. As expected, I could not find any reference to a data strategy from commercial businesses. However, I was very positively surprised when I found more than ten examples of data strategies published by governmental agencies worldwide. In this article, I will reference the following publicly available strategies:

Strategy 1: United States Department of Agriculture, Fiscal Year 2020-2024   Data Strategy

Strategy 2: United States Intelligence Community, The IC Data Strategy 2023-2025

Strategy 3: US Department of Education, Data Strategy, 2023

Strategy 4: The State of Oregon, Data Strategy, 2021-2023

Strategy 5: NASA Data Strategy, 2021

This article will discuss the following topics:

• Organizations´ attitudes toward developing data strategies and associated challenges
• A data management structure recommended by the industry authorities
• A data (management) strategy content: recommended vs. presented in strategies mentioned above
• Recommendations for developing a (meta)data (management) strategy

Due to the large text volume, I split this article into two parts.