Introduction 

As the world is becoming digital savvy day by day, data has become an essential asset to businesses nowadays. A company’s data defines its ability to compete with its competitors and will also be a decisive factor in having the edge over others. Hence, it becomes imperative to leverage data, plan data strategies and use analytics to implement new and advanced technologies. The International Institute for Analytics has said that businesses that use data will witness benefits in productivity of up to 430 billion dollars over their rivals who are not using the data by 2020.   

Therefore, it is safe to say that data is a key asset for businesses, and it’s changing the way businesses operate, be it any industry or sector. Moreover, every business, big or small, must become a data business. Every company will require a robust and modern data strategy that will align with the mission and vision of the company.  

Why do we need a data strategy?  

A data strategy is now a need of the hour for every business. When you see the sheer amount of data available, you will realize that you need a sound data analytics strategy to manage and maintain the exponential growth of data. These days, many businesses are getting so caught up in the buzz of big data that they store as much data as they can without knowing how to manage this data. And other businesses choose to bury their heads in the sand overwhelmed by so many options.  

 Organizations should start with the data strategy first instead of starting with data as it does not matter what kind of data you or your rival organizations are storing, what kind of data is out there or what new categories and forms of data are getting available in the market. Also, it won’t make much difference whether your company has loads of data to analyze or not. A successful data strategy will not be about the availability of data, but it will be all about are business goals of your organization and how is that data going to help you in achieving those goals.  

Therefore, if organizations don’t want to find themselves drowning in the sea of data, they must develop an intelligent data strategy to emphasize the data they need to fulfil their business goals and targets. According to TechEela, data should address the needs specific to business and help achieve strategic company goals to produce value. It further means that you should acknowledge the challenges and raise questions critical for business. These challenges and questions must be addressed and answered with the help of the data collected and analyzed.  

As organizations cannot neglect advanced analytics and data analytics, companies have become key identifier in a highly competitive environment. It is also crucial to remember that no one type of data is better than others. Strategic use of data inherently means extracting useful insights and creating the most value out of that data that will help your organization. With the abundance of data these days, the key is to find the chunks of data that will ultimately benefit your company.  

The basic elements of a good data analytics strategy are:  

• Recognizing your data requirements- you should first make it clear how you would like to use the data before finding out the data requirements for your organization. Data requirements will differ with different business goals with time.  
• Data collection– When you have figured out what you are going to achieve with data you can now proceed with how you are going to source and collect data to meet your goals. Data collection can be done in many different ways, such as purchasing or accessing external data, using internal data, and exploring new methods to collect data.  
• Turning data into insights- A good strategy should include how data analytics will be applied to the data to extract insights crucial to business and help figure out market and business trends that will help improve business operations, data valuation, and making sound business-related decisions.  
• Technological requirements– When you are done deciding what kind of data do you want to collect and how you want to leverage it, the next step in making a good data strategy is to identify the technological and infrastructural requirements. This means you have to decide which software or hardware to invest in to get your data analyzed and extract insights.  

In conclusion, with massive growth in data and data analysis methods, the significance of data keeps on increasing so will the importance of data strategy. A robust data strategy will improve data management practices in the organization, but it will also help succeed in the new age data-oriented world.