Data-Driven Strategies: An Empirical Study Based on Executive Perceptions

This paper examines how senior executives perceive the conditions under which an organization becomes data driven, and how those perceptions can be organised, through an explicit procedure, into candidate strategic orientations. An exploratory descriptive survey of twenty-five items built on five pillars of the data-driven organization was completed by fifty executives across ten sectors. Frequencies are read as indicating the prevalence of a reported perception within this purposive panel, not as measures of capability, importance or effect; factors are selected and classified under written rules, with every judgement reported alongside its alternative. The conditions most widely reported were descriptive analytics, cloud or hybrid infrastructure, training and awareness programmes, and data being available daily or in real time; the constraints most often reported were a data strategy not strongly aligned with the business strategy, data accuracy problems, resistance to change, a shortage of qualified talent, and data fragmentation. Respondent-level comparisons qualify two of the study’s own interpretations. Crossing these conditions through the TOWS matrix yields four candidate orientations; because the external quadrants are thinly evidenced, the two that cross the single threat are the most provisional. The output is a perception-based conceptual framework that distinguishes what respondents reported, what the researchers coded, what was inferred and what remains to be validated, and it requires external validation.