How to prove the business value of your data and AI initiatives

At CGI we have the privilege of working with executive level clients across various industries and sectors. One of the common challenges we observe is how to demonstrate the business value of data and AI initiatives. Many organisations have ambitious visions and goals for becoming data-driven but struggle to translate them into concrete and measurable data missions that align with their strategic objectives. This can lead to frustration, confusion, and wasted resources.

Why do you need to prove the business value of data and AI initiatives?

Demonstrating that your data and AI initiatives drive value for your business is important for several reasons:

Strategic alignment: Firstly, to ensure your data and AI initiatives are relevant, impactful, and aligned with your business priorities. Without a clear alignment to a strategy, data and AI initiatives can become disconnected, siloed, and ineffective.

Winning over stakeholders: Secondly, to help to communicate the value proposition of data and AI to your stakeholders, and to secure their confidence, buy-in, and support.

Delivering and measuring results: Finally, showing clear and measurable return on investment (ROI) for each initiative helps ensure you’re actually focusing on the right metrics. Too often, data initiatives are measured by technical or operational metrics, such as data quality, data availability, or data processing speed. While these are important, they don’t necessarily reflect the business value or the outcomes that the initiatives are supposed to deliver. By defining and tracking the ROI of your data and AI initiatives, you can ensure you’re investing in the right products and services and delivering value to your business and customers.

The challenge

Actually demonstrating how your data and AI initiatives drive business value remains a major challenge for many COOs, CTOs and CDOs. So, how can you overcome this challenge and realise the full potential of data and AI for your organisation?

The solution: CGI’s Data Product Framework

At CGI, we’ve developed a Data Product Framework to help our clients focus their investment and effort on high value data and AI initiatives and effectively measure their ROI. Our framework is based on the following principles:

• Products, not projects: we treat data and AI initiatives as products rather than projects. This means they’re designed to solve a specific business problem or opportunity, and deliver value to your end users and customers.
• Alignment to vision and mission: we help clients align data and AI products to your organisation's vision and data missions to make sure they’re relevant, impactful, and strategic.
• Value based measurements: we help clients measure their data and AI products by business outcomes, not technical or operational metrics. This means they’re evaluated by what matters - the value they create for your business and customers.

Proven success for our clients

Let us give you an example of how we’ve successfully applied this approach for a client. The client had a vision of becoming a data-driven organisation and they’d invested in various data initiatives, such as data lake, data governance, data analytics and AI. But they weren’t seeing the expected results and benefits from their initiatives and were struggling to link their data and AI initiatives to their business value and measure their ROI.

In partnership with the client, we helped them to identify, prioritise, and execute high value data and AI initiatives that aligned to their vision and data missions. We also helped them to define and track the business outcomes of each data initiative.

As a result, the client was able to focus their investment and effort on data initiatives that delivered demonstrable value to their business and their customers. This also brought the client confidence and rigor around an outcome-focused mindset. They were able to communicate the value proposition of data to their stakeholders and secure their buy-in and support. The client was also able to foster a culture of data-driven decision making and to leverage data as a strategic asset for their organisation. In fact, this mindset shift also provided a solid foundation for wider AI initiatives and brought into sharp focus that, to truly realise a future vision of AI, many core data initiatives will need prioritisation and investment.

Conclusion

Linking data and AI initiatives to business value is a critical challenge for many organisations, but it’s also a great opportunity to realise the full potential of data and AI. With our CGI Data Product Framework we help our clients to overcome this challenge and achieve success in their data journeys. The framework helps organisations focus on high value data initiatives, measure business outcomes, and deliver value to business and customers.

How can we help you?

Interested in learning more about our Data Product Framework? Want to find out how CGI can help you with your data challenges? Please contact us for a discussion, we’d love to hear from you!