Strategy – Demystify Data

This post is in continuation of my earlier post – Demystify Data. The link to that post is:

LinkedIn Post: Demystify Data

This is a very broad topic for coming up with a holistic strategy to demystify data. To start, I will share some high-level guiding principles with broader areas of capabilities required:

Guiding Principles – Demystify Data

1. Focus on the clear definition of data ownership, supporting policies, processes, and people—not on the tools.
2. Data is the bloodstream for any business—profit or non-profit.
3. Think of the human heart analogy: just like the heart governs and cleans blood, data governance and rigor are needed to manage data flow and trust.
4. Stand-alone data is just numbers without meaning.
5. Data needs clear context to be transformed into Information → Knowledge → Wisdom.
6. Each data context has associated domains with single sources of truth, upstream, and downstream lineage.
7. Data, being fluid like blood, requires strong security controls aligned to defined security goals.
8. Define data flows to understand cross-functional integration and dependencies.
9. Understand types of data: Master, Transactional, Structured, Unstructured.
10. Separate the “What” and the “How.” For example, defining Master Data is different from managing it.

In future posts, I will provide detailed playbooks to support these principles. The intent is to demystify data by breaking complex problems into smaller, understandable, and actionable components.