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 organization.
Solution: Grounding strategy in business reality
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 organization, 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.
Results: Empowering leadership with evidence-based strategy
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 organization
- 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.
Sarah Fox, COO at Hyphen commented, “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.”
If you need to build or strengthen your data strategy, we can help. Download our Data Strategy Methodology Guide for practical insights and proven frameworks to get started. Or, if you're ready to take the next step, get in touch with our strategy experts to start a conversation about your business goals and where your data can used to support them.
Guide | Data Strategy Methodology
In this guide, you'll find our full methodology and process of Amplifi Data Strategy engagements. Our SVP Strategy & Consulting, Stuart Squires narrates this guide, running through the steps of the methodology and breaking out in different segments to assess a pair of real life Amplifi client engagements at each stage.
