John C. Maxwell says “leaders see before and leaders see further”. Seeing before and seeing further are key to navigating the complexities and uncertainties ahead in 2025 and beyond. Data serves as the compass that guides leaders and organizations through the fog of uncertainty, enabling them to make informed decisions and strategically position themselves for success.

As we head into Q4, it's critical for leaders to use data to be prepared for whatever comes their way. At The Data Group, we use the term ‘OTTER’— OTTER stands for a One-Version-of-the-Truth cloud-based data warehouse, providing a unified answer to every question based on your business's data. Developing your OTTER by loading all your company’s data into a single data warehouse is the best foundation you can build for your company’s future. Once you load your OTTER with all your mission-critical data, you’re ready to start using your data in amazing ways.

Alerts: At The Data Group, our SIERRA platform is used to notify our team of problems before our customers know about them. Alerts are set up with business rules, allowing us to address issues proactively. This builds trust with our customers and shows our dedication to their needs. Alerts can cover a range of situations, from failed data jobs, unusual transactions, connectivity issues, and data problems. Our OTTER platform integrates alerts from multiple systems and provides valuable insights for solving problems and cleaning up data. However, it's important not to overuse alerts to ensure they remain effective.

Dashboards: Keeping them simple, visually appealing, and accurate is important. People won't engage with a dashboard if it isn't easy to visually understand, especially if it is inaccurate. Investing in well-designed, user-friendly dashboards is crucial to avoid wasting resources on unused tools. Our company uses Sigma for data analytics because Sigma works directly on top of Snowflake. Sigma’s data views provide a simple way to see all your data and all the tools you’ll need for the data discovery process. When creating a dashboard, it's important to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) for different user groups. Understanding each group's most important KPIs and prioritizing the essential metrics is important.

Portals: Data-driven portals make it super easy to interact with your company by allowing 80% of interactions to be self-service, and your team can focus on the 20% that needs special attention. The younger generation expects to be able to do everything online. They won't be your customers if they can’t do business with you online, though. Everyone tends to focus on Customer Portals, which are incredibly important. However, internal employee portals and vendor portals can provide amazing efficiencies, satisfaction, and growth.

Integrations: Data integration boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and improves data quality. Yet, many companies still rely heavily on spreadsheets and make the mistake of using horizontal integrations between key systems, like CRMs and financial tools, which create dependencies. Instead, building an OTTER allows for flexible vertical integrations where all systems feed data into the OTTER. This approach means that if a system is replaced, only one integration needs updating, minimizing disruption and preserving data integrity. OTTERs also simplify data conversion when switching systems, ensuring efficiency and reducing costs. In short, OTTERs are amazing and quickly become your company’s most valuable asset!

AI: Of course, AI is a huge theme in the modern world. Everyone is talking about AI, and there are some great cases in which AI can help companies become more efficient. The reality is that AI, just like our brains, runs off of data. Data inputs determine the outputs. If you put a bunch of poor-quality information into your brain, you’ll make bad decisions, leading to terrible outcomes. The same is true for AI. Before launching any AI initiative, you must ensure your data is solid. First, you’ll need to gather, consolidate, and integrate your data into a single warehouse you own and control. However, this data will be full of the previously mentioned poor-quality information. So, the next step is to establish total visibility of that data so you can clean, fix, and enrich it to make it useful. If you have not yet implemented a solid data strategy to roll these steps out, the data you will feed into your AI initiatives will be put in the proverbial cart before the horse. Remember, AI runs on data. You must have solid data to have successful AI initiatives.

Developing your OTTER is the first step in transforming your company into a data-driven business and yourself into a data-driven leader. Developing an OTTER and transforming your company into a data-driven business takes commitment and perseverance, but there is no better way to establish a scalable and secure foundation for future growth. The Data Group is here to motivate and guide you through the entire process of building your OTTER and transforming your company into a truly data-driven business.

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