Thirty-five years after Robert Waterman’s observation in In Search of Excellence that companies were “data rich and information poor,” little has changed. For sure companies are “data richer,” having exponentially more data at their disposal. But they are still information poor, even as leaders have implemented a wide array of programs aimed at exploiting data. Most still struggle to build data into their business strategies and, conversely, to align their data efforts to the needs of the business. There are a host of reasons, from lack of talent to unreasonable expectations to culture. Solving these problems is essential for those that wish to unleash the power of data across their organizations.

It should come as no surprise that data is not yet strategic for many organizations. Business is already complex enough: When setting a company strategy, there are customers to satisfy, competitors to fend off, uncertain regulatory environments to accommodate, and skills gaps that must be closed. Plenty of great ideas — including carbon neutrality, diversity, social responsibility, new technologies, and yes, data — compete for resources and attention. Many success stories confirm data can add enormous value, but it is hard to know where data fits.

How organizations actually view their data assets is all over the map. Managers use it every day, even as they don’t fully trust it. Many find basic statistics confusing. People are rightly proud of their decision-making capabilities and see little need for better analytics or AI. They recoil at the thought of some sort of central oversight to their data, yet are stunned when a data issue creates unforeseen risk. While they know that privacy and security is important, no one has ever made their accountabilities explicit. And they realize that becoming a data-driven organization involves adapting their culture, which is difficult and time-consuming. It is little wonder that data is still far from the business strategy mainstream.

The data side of the business is no less complex. There is no shortage of great opportunities and demands, from analytics and artificial intelligence to data quality, monetization, privacy, small data, and security. Still most data work is of a keep-the-lights-on variety, such as adding new fields to databases, aligning systems that don’t talk, defining metadata, putting low-level governance in place, implementing business intelligence systems, wrangling data to feed machine-learning algorithms, and so on. All require business participation, but those who work with data have trouble engaging the business on these tasks, never mind strategy. When the business does ask for better data controls, data experts may lack the skills or business connections needed to drive an idea forward. The result is that data activities are too low-level, short-term, and poorly connected to business strategy.

But when integrated properly, data can accelerate many — even most — business strategies by improving the processes and empowering the people needed to execute them. Consider the example of a large medical center. The center’s management team understood that better use of data must become a core healthcare practice. But its data programs had fallen short of leadership’s expectations. To figure out why, the Chief Data Officer (CDO) matched each current data initiative to a list of possible scenarios where data can be used to achieve value. It became apparent that the data program was actually a collection of important, but one-off, projects. None were strategically aligned, and collectively, they were not up to the medical center’s needs. Once this issue was identified, the medical center was able to combine various initiatives into strategic initiatives that were tightly focused on business strategy, and then rigorously managed.

Better results across the entire center followed shortly thereafter. Most tangibly, compliance costs and fines were reduced, saving tens of millions of dollars. Improving provider data across all clinics made physicians’ jobs easier and led to better patient care. In turn, patient access improved, with increased visits for routine examinations for diabetes and colon cancer screenings, all while the center still maintained its target operating margins.