Is Your Data Ready for 2026?

 

You can’t achieve your 2026 AI and decision-making goals unless your data is ready. 

What’s our AI agenda? How do we lead our competition?

If you haven’t heard that question already, you’ll soon hear it. Perhaps you’ve even made progress toward launching and using new and different ways of answering questions, getting insights, or helping your customers.

But - is your data ready for what you want to do? Or will it trip you up?

How would you convince your board, management, regulators, or customers that you’re ready? What metrics or indicators would you use?

What do you have in place to keep you from experiencing:

  • Poor investment or management decisions based on good models but flawed data?

  • Leadership mistakenly using data in the wrong context or the wrong way, and looking for someone to blame?

  • Incorrect operational decisions due to flawed data, leading to fines, loss of customer or public confidence, or even tragedy?

Readiness - and how we measure it - depends on more than technology. It relies heavily on the leadership, accountability, controls, and training we put in place. The value promised by investing time and technology in data science, AI, and analytics will fall well below expectations without equal investment in these important capabilities.

Would you rather have director level and above people continue struggling with poor data, and making poor decisions - or doing better things with it, now?

Here’s the good news. There’s things you can do, now, at low or no cost, to get ready.

These changes can also redeploy 15% or more of your leadership and employee hours otherwise spent on data problems and fixes into more productive, value-oriented activities. Or, even better, sharpen your OPEX/CAPEX, revenue growth, or margin by 1-2%.

The results pay for the much smaller investment in time and money that you could make to change things, now.

Leadership, Coordination, and Ownership: The Hidden Success - or Failure - of Being Ready

To have data that’s ready for 2026 and the challenges it will bring, companies need to do more buying technology and hiring technical skills. Yes - they’ll need data scientists, architects, and engineers. And, they’ll need to have a proven CDO in place. But the real difference between success and failure will lie in the extent to which everyone works together to succeed. In particular, by being able to confidently answer these questions:

  • How will you measure data readiness? What particular indicators and metrics will you use?

  • Who will be accountable for achieving them?

  • How will they achieve that? What programs, projects, and training will be in place to achieve that?

  • What are the biggest risks that might be standing in your way? What is your plan to mitigate them and avoid them?

  • What will you need to spend in terms of time, money, resources to get there?

  • What’s the expected ROI and timeframe for being ready?

Let’s Talk.

A simple :25 minute conversation could lead to some immediate insights and ideas. And it only takes a few weeks of focused effort to have answers to the above questions. Are you ready for 2026?

Schedule :30 minutes with me to discuss. My calendar is here.