What is the one indispensable action you would emphasize for a successful Data Strategy, which would have a lasting impact on your organization's long term competitiveness?

The one indispensable action I would emphasize for a successful Data Strategy that would have a lasting impact on an organization's long-term competitiveness is to prioritize data governance.

Effective data governance ensures that data is accurate, complete, secure, and compliant with regulations, which is crucial for making informed business decisions. A well-designed data governance framework will establish clear policies and procedures for data management, ownership, quality control, and access. It will also define roles and responsibilities for data stewardship, ensuring that data is managed and maintained throughout its lifecycle.

By prioritizing data governance, an organization can create a culture of data-driven decision-making, minimize the risk of data breaches and other data-related issues, and maximize the value of its data assets. This, in turn, will enhance the organization's long-term competitiveness by providing insights and opportunities for innovation, growth, and customer satisfaction.

First and foremost is alignment with organization's goals and next consistent, open communication across the organization.

Create awareness amongst the organization through townhalls and make it a point to talk about it in every major meetings. Collaboration between IT, business, operations and data science teams are of paramount importance. Without collaboration the entire effort fails

Data Mesh architecture, which has the following 4 key principles:
- Domain-driven ownership of data
- Data as a product
- Self-serve data platform
- Federated computational governance

Share a commonmeta dictionary between IT and Business because ubiquitous language is the most important challenge to win in long term software strategy.

A lot of time happen that in the sourcecode you call a field in a manner that doesn’t have any counterpart in the business processes.

Accuracy at the first instance. Capture as much possible directly from the originator as errors can derail your decision.