What's your data strategy? The key is to balance offense and defense

The authors recommend a data management strategy that is both defensive (such as governance and security) and offensive (such as prediction analytics). Key elements of the defensive approach include ensuring data quality and security, with core activities involving optimizing data standardization, extraction, access, and storage. Key elements of the offensive approach include improving the firm's profitability and competitive position, with core activities involving optimizing data modeling, analytics, transformation, visualization, and enrichment. The enabling architecture for defense would be SSOT (single source of truth), while offense would utilize MVOTs (multiple versions of the truth). A company's position on the defense-offense spectrum is typically dynamic, responding to market, competition, and culture.