Digitalisation · November 2025 · 7 min read
Why most data strategies fail at the second hand-off
Data strategies are usually evaluated on the integrity of the first hand-off: source system to warehouse, raw to modelled, ingestion to availability. The reason most of them disappoint is the second hand-off: from warehouse to actual decision, in a meeting, by a human.
The argument
The second hand-off is governed less by engineering and more by organisational design. It fails when the data product has no named consumer, when the consumer is graded on a metric the data does not move, or when the cadence of the data does not match the cadence of the decision it is meant to inform. None of these are platform problems; all of them get blamed on the platform.
What we see in the field
We see the same failure mode repeatedly: a sophisticated data platform serving a leadership team that is still making the same decisions, on the same cadence, using the same instinct, that they did before the platform existed. The diagnosis is rarely that the data is wrong; it is that no one is paid to use it.
What it changes
For CDOs, the implication is that the second hand-off is the actual product. For CEOs, it is that data investment without an explicit change to how decisions are made is, predictably, capex without a return.
Where to start
Pick the three most expensive recurring decisions in the business. For each, name the data product, the human consumer and the decision cadence. The gaps are the strategy.
