Becoming a Data-First Business

*Updated 26 March 2025*

Data. It’s more valuable than ever. As The Economist famously stated back in 2017, “the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” 

Fast forward to today, and that statement holds even more weight. In 2025, the world is projected to generate over 328.77 million terabytes of data daily. This staggering volume underscores data's role as a modern currency, with individuals exchanging it for access, personalisation, and convenience across digital platforms.  

This explosion of information, coupled with accelerated digital transformation, has reignited a crucial conversation: What does it truly mean to become a data-first business? 

It’s no longer enough to simply collect data. Businesses today must embed it at the heart of everything they do—from strategic decision-making and customer experience to innovation and operational efficiency. Becoming data-first means fostering a culture where insights drive action, data literacy is widespread, and agility is powered by real-time intelligence. 

What is a Data-First Business?

In recent years, having a strong data strategy has gone from a nice-to-have to a critical business priority. As the world becomes increasingly digital, the volume—and value—of data continues to grow. But it’s not just about collecting data; it’s about using it to drive smarter decisions across the entire business. 

A data-first (or data-driven) business is one that places data at the core of its decision-making. It relies on data analysis and interpretation—not just instinct or tradition—to guide strategic choices. This approach helps organisations make more informed, objective, and impactful decisions that better serve their customers, employees, and stakeholders. 

Unlike opinions or gut feelings, data provides a neutral foundation. When used effectively, a data-first strategy enables businesses to: 

• Make more reliable, evidence-based decisions 

• Reduce risk by replacing guesswork with insights 

• Align people, processes, and technology around shared objectives 

That said, being data-first doesn’t guarantee instant success. Data can shift, evolve, or reveal unexpected insights. But it does give your organisation a clearer lens on what’s happening—and what’s likely to happen next—so you can adapt faster and plan with confidence. 

How Does ‘Big Data’ Tie into a Data Strategy?

As organisations embrace a data-first mindset, many of the datasets they work with fall under what we now refer to as big data. Understanding how big data fits into strategic decision-making is crucial for businesses aiming to stay agile, competitive, and customer-focused. 

According to Gartner, big data refers to high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high-variety information assets that require cost-effective, innovative processing to unlock enhanced insights, smarter decision-making, and process automation. Let’s break that down: 

• Volume: This is the sheer amount of data being generated—from IoT sensors, mobile apps, social media, customer interactions, and business transactions. With cloud storage now more accessible and scalable, managing vast amounts of data is easier than ever. 

• Velocity: The speed at which data is generated and needs to be processed. Real-time data streams from platforms and devices require real-time analytics and fast decision-making—something cloud-based technologies are increasingly enabling. 
• Variety: Data comes in many forms, from structured (like databases and spreadsheets) to semi-structured and unstructured formats (like emails, documents, videos, or social media posts). A data-first business needs the ability to handle and make sense of all of them. 

Data-first organisations harness big data not just for reporting, but for real-time strategy and optimisation. Take Deliveroo, for example. Their intelligent dispatch engine—aptly named Frank—uses machine learning models trained on historical data to predict food prep times and rider travel times. It continuously recalculates the best match between rider and order, even reassigning orders on the fly when real-world variables like traffic delays occur (Source: Silicon). 

Supermarkets are also leveraging big data in similar ways—optimising delivery routes for online orders to be not only cost-efficient but increasingly eco-conscious, factoring in environmental impact as part of their logistics planning. 

How can my Business Become Data-First?

For business leaders, this is a key question. With data becoming increasingly important for their digital transformation journey we outline three core characteristics of data-first businesses.

1. Build a Data-First Culture

In the same way you must build a culture that embraces change for successful digital transformation, you must also build a culture that understands the importance of being data-first. While 80% of CEOs claim they have operationalised the notion of data as an asset, only 10% say their company treats it that way (Gartner).

Key to having a data-first culture is not only having the technology infrastructure in place to handle it, but also the people in place.

The data can only take the organisation so far. The real drivers are the people. 
- Alan Duncan and Frank Buytendijk, Gartner

This means:

• Hiring data-first people like chief data officers (CDOs), analysts and data managers
• Ensuring there are clear goal posts and performance reviews surrounding data
• Delivering training throughout the organisation for the management of data and dashboards and systems that display data

2. Make Data Accessible and Easy to Understand

Consider how your new systems use and present data. Do they present it in a way that’s easy to understand by the team that uses it? Can you use the data to automate next actions? Or can it notify you when the data drops above or below a certain threshold?

Whether you’re looking to optimise your workforce or better ways of customer experience management, the right tools will empower your team to become data-first.

NetX for example, our SIP portal has been created to empower self-service amongst our customers. It has a wealth of features and functionality, to help businesses take control of calls and their call environment. Some of which relate highly to data management, including granular analytics and customisable real-time dashboards.

To be able to generate not just reports using NetX, but real-time insight into call behaviour is a fantastic boost to our ability to be a responsive data-led organisation. It gives us a unified and meaningful view of the environment, saving time and effort.
- Lou Lwin, Group Head of Enterprise Architecture, Markerstudy

3. Reduce your Data Silos to Create a Single Version of the Truth

Easier said than done, but vital to work towards in becoming a data-first business. Data silos result in a serve lack of transparency, efficiency and sometimes even trust within businesses.

They usually happen when data is collected by a business tool that is isolated from the rest of your technology infrastructure. It’s vital, particularly in working towards a data-first culture to eliminate silos.

Aside from the cultural elements they also:

• Block you from having a 360-degree view of the department and therefore entire business
• Lead to bad customer experience management
• Don’t promote business growth
• Waste cloud storage space
• Threaten the accuracy of data

The good news is, you don’t need to rip out all your systems and start again to remove your data silos (unless you want to). Clever integration and cloud overlay technologies (like B•CONNECTED) can modernise and integrate your existing systems.

Moving forwards if you look to implement technology that is an all-in-one solution or is API-centric, you’ll find it much easier to reduce the amount of data silos that exist within your business.

Think People, Data, Process, Technology!

People, data, process and technology (in that order) is key methodology to consider if you’re looking to become data-first.

People:

• Consider the key players how you can get buy-in from the business
• Recruit where necessary to have more skill in handling data strategy
• Commence the data-first journey by altering your culture

Data:

• Think about the data you already have that’s not being utilised
• Assess how you can use the data to enhance the customer experience
• What data can you add to the data you already have?

Process:

• Identify where you need to start to become data-first
• Which are your biggest data related challenges?
• Review them with stakeholders to identify gaps and issues

Technology:

• You can now look at technology that will support the change to data-first
• Think about how the new technology will integrate with existing systems
• Consider if data can be easily accessed and presented across the business

As we continue to obtain more datasets, being a data-first business will be key to success. A good place to start could well be to simply use the data you’re already sitting on better. Using it to drive decisions, improve customer experience management and create efficiencies in how staff work. This could be achieved through automation technology, or something that pulls data through from your backend systems.