Business-led, evidence-driven: Building Hyphen’s data strategy for growth

Hyphen is a multi-national architectural consultancy working in countries across Europe, Latin America and beyond, delivering large-scale B2B projects across six sectors. The business has enjoyed rapid growth, expanding its reach and expertise to meet the needs of a wide-ranging client base.  

Supporting this scale is a small but dedicated IT team, whose primary focus has been on keeping the core infrastructure running smoothly. As Hyphen’s footprint expanded, the business operations teams were asked to fulfil an increasingly diverse range of requirements across multiple regions, each with its own unique demands and ways of working. 

Over time, this led to several common challenges seen in fast-growing organisations such as: 

• Over-reliance on a single core system, which was stretched beyond its original purpose 
• Manual workarounds and localised processes used to fill operational gaps 
• Inconsistent ways of working and standards across regions, making alignment at scale difficult 

With all of this came a growing trust challenge, as the limitations of systems and data made it harder for teams to confidently access, share, and act on the information they needed. 

Although these challenges hadn’t hindered Hyphen’s success so far, the leadership team knew they needed to tackle them to enable the next stage of growth, so they came to Amplifi. 

Hyphen’s leaders suspected poor data was holding the business back but couldn’t pinpoint how or where. Without clear evidence of the issues or their impact, they couldn’t justify investment or know where to focus efforts. Hyphen’s leadership engaged Amplifi’s data strategy experts to uncover the specific challenges and opportunities across their data landscape, understand the tangible business impact and communicate why those issues mattered to people across the organisation. 

To help Hyphen untangle the roots of its data challenges, Amplifi launched a strategic engagement grounded in the business’ long-term goals. We began by immersing ourselves in business context, reviewing core documents such as the CEO’s five-year plan and board-level reporting to ensure our recommendations were aligned with where the business was heading. 

We facilitated five structured workshops with around 20 leaders from across the global organisation, covering key functions such as Finance, HR, Projects and IT. To ensure focused discussion, we shared a template in advance for attendees to capture their challenges, priorities and ambitions. This helped shape the workshops and ensured that input from across the business was highlighted and reflected in the final outcomes. 

From the workshops, we gathered over 600 inputs from the business leaders, categorised into three areas: 

• What people were trying to achieve 
• How business performance was being impacted 
• Where the biggest opportunities might be 

These inputs were consolidated into 21 recommended data management initiatives, covering areas such as data strategy, data governance and the role of people. Each recommendation was backed by evidence, with clear themes and priorities identified. While we proposed an extensive list of activities, we were mindful of their limited resources and prioritised early wins that required minimal investment and effort. 

Key findings were written up specifically for C-level stakeholders, supported by real quotes from across the business that helped bring the issues to life. 

Hyphen moved from anecdotal understanding to clear, evidence-based insight into the state of its data landscape. By the end of the engagement, the leadership team had full visibility of where challenges existed, what impact they were having, and how to begin addressing them in a structured, prioritised way. 

The engagement helped Hyphen to: 

• Identify exactly where data challenges existed across the organisation 
• Understand how those challenges were impacting business performance 
• Prioritise which problems to solve first and why 
• Connect each recommendation to specific business outcomes 
• Clarify who needed to be involved in delivery, from leadership to operational teams 
• Highlight where changes might be needed in technology or team structure 

The project concluded with a practical, multi-year roadmap which allowed Hyphen’s leadership to make a confident case to the board about where to invest and why, producing a long-term strategy that could guide change in a structured, sustainable way. 

“Amplifi’s approach was clear and professional, the final report was extremely detailed with good evidence. The workshops were engaging and worked for all parties regardless of how well prepared they were. The feedback sessions that followed were insightful and valuable in identifying not only the current issues, but the priorities we need to address and how we might move forward.”

Sarah FoxCOO at Hyphen