The foundation under the data strategy

The situation

The group was assembled by acquisition. That gives it reach, six established point-of-sale products and their customers. It also gives it six data models, six reporting stacks and no single way to see a venue.

Every ambition the business has for data and AI sits on top of that. If the foundation is not shared, every feature gets built six times, or only for the newest product, which leaves most of the customer base behind.

My part, stated precisely

The CEO owns the vision. I lead the foundation it is built on:

• Cloud reporting for the legacy products, so older estates are not stranded while the platform moves on.
• An acquired platform, bought out of voluntary administration. I reviewed its stack and migrated its IP into ours.
• Its best capability, extended to everyone: budgeting, forecasting and labour against revenue, now served to the other point-of-sale brands rather than one.
• The data streaming requirement that everything downstream depends on.

I sit on the leadership group shaping the strategy, with several sessions a week with internal and external stakeholders.

The decision that mattered

When you acquire a product out of administration, the tempting move is to keep it running as it is and sell it to its old customers. We did the opposite. We took the capability, not the product, and put it into the shared platform, so every brand’s customers could have it.

It is slower at the start. It is the only version that compounds.

Status

In flight, and labelled that way on purpose. This is a foundation, and foundations are judged by what gets built on them. The honest measure is still to come: how many brands, venues and features stand on it a year from now.