If, as CxO, you’re asked what your company is doing to maximise its data opportunities and your answer is ‘we’re building a data warehouse’ or ‘we’re about to produce a single customer view’, are you sure you’ve been asking the right questions?

Are you assured that these technical solutions will really deliver what your business needs? Let’s put it another way – if you were planning your dream home would your starting point be ‘I want PEX piping’ or ‘I want picture windows’?

Through this winter we’ll be talking here at Ammonite about how to break the failing mould of traditional data solution development. We believe the key to better solving your data challenges lies in the most important question that every business leader should ask before signing off a data initiative. That question is simply ‘why are we doing this?’. It’s about identifying the real business need and whether the proposed solution is the best solution to address that need?

Back to the dream house analogy …

Why might you want a dream house and what need(s) would it have to meet – a growing family, somewhere quiet, a property with land, by the sea, on a single level, to entertain more, with spectacular mountain views, or with space to develop a home-based business? Once you really understand why you’re doing something it’s more likely your solution will meet your needs.

I’m often reminded of an episode of the Vicar of Dibley (The Window & the Weather) in which Geraldine realises that the solution to replacing a storm damaged stained-glass window isn’t to break the bank to create a shockingly expensive new stained-glass window but to buy inexpensive clear glass that enables churchgoers to look out on a naturally beautiful view. Geraldine had shifted her thinking to focus on the parishioners real need rather than jump to the solution. She ended up with a solution that was very different to that first envisaged, significantly cheaper and quite beautiful.

Over the next few months, we’re going to demonstrate the application to data solutions of client/customer-oriented thinking that leads to effective product development. You’ll hear from us how Ammonite’s approach to delivering successful data solutions combines lean product thinking with well-tried data practice, with principles of software engineering and with contemporary technologies and data science.

Article written by Avi Marco, Chief Data Mentor

At Ammonite we mean it when we say, ‘Data Done Differently ’. And we’re looking forward to sharing our ideas with you.

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To find out how we can help you achieve ROI and gain competitive advantage from your data, contact Ammonite.