Build a Data Strategy for Professional Service Organizations

Fragmented systems and limited integration are limiting the opportunity for proactive decision-making. The knock-on effect of this shows up in resource underutilization, delivery issues, and cost control all severely impacting the bottom line.
Overreliance on contractors due to poor forecasting puts further pressure on margins, while limited investment in internal upskilling continues to weaken talent readiness.
Client expectations are shifting toward measurable ROI and faster delivery, especially considering the advances of Gen AI to accomplish portions of the PSO work product.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Shifting from technical planning to a business-aligned data strategy accelerates time to value by clarifying priorities, demonstrating ROI, and enabling executive buy-in.
Without a focused, client-centric data strategy, PSO firms are flying blind while AI reshapes client expectations.

Impact and Result

This research enables a streamlined process to achieve executive buy-in by purposefully linking data initiatives directly to revenue, internal metrics, and client impact.
Additionally, it equips IT leadership with a clear outcome-focused narrative to prioritize investment and successfully drive transformation.
Finally, it helps position the firm to meet shifting market conditions with measurable, data-driven service improvements.

Build a Data Strategy for Professional Service Organizations Research & Tools

1. Build a Data Strategy for Professional Service Organizations Phases 1-5 – A pragmatic roadmap for B2B firms to drive client-centric outcomes.

This storyboard helps B2B-focused professional service firms build a client-centric data strategy that improves profitability, enables proactive decision-making, and strengthens competitive differentiation.

As always, the first challenge is knowing where to start. Many professional service firms understand the value of data to improve their decision making and meet client expectations; however, they are unsure of how to turn that potential into a differentiated competitive advantage.

2. PSO-Specific Data Strategy Exemplar Presentation – This presentation template offers a detailed, customizable data strategy to help you achieve executive buy-in.

This in-depth presentation template provides an example of a complete data strategy, ready to be tailored to firm and presented to your executive leadership to gain support for your strategy.

3. PSO-Specific Data Strategy Stakeholder Interview Guide – This template guides you through a robust interview process to determine your firms current data and analytics utilization.

Use the structure and questions within this template to help you frame your discussion with stakeholders and support your team in defining the data and analytics needs related to your line of business objectives.

4. PSO-Specific Business Context Interview Guide – This template identifies key organization leaders and questions needed to understand top priorities.

Use this template as a starting point to interview your organization leaders to elicit the right context, extracting business goals, organizational priorities, and key initiatives that will play a critical role in building your data strategy.

5. Data Initiatives & Strategy Ideation Primer – Use this primer to help connect the dots between what the organization needs and what is technically possible for your data team.

This primer is an enablement tool designed to help facilitate the closure of the gap between technical execution and firm objectives. It supports IT and data leaders translate firm challenges into high-value data initiatives.

6. PSO-Specific Data Value Mapping Tool – Give a one-sentence description of what the deliverable will help them do.

This holistic value mapping tool guides you through a step-by-step process to understand how to realistically deliver tangible value from data that your executives will understand, care about, and are willing to support.

Use this tool to document and assess potential data initiatives, prioritize them against organization needs, assess key risks, and develop an indicative timeline for your key initiatives.

A pragmatic roadmap for B2B firms to drive client-centric outcomes.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 5-phase advisory process. You'll receive 11 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1:

Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
Call 2: Establish business context for your strategy.
Call 3: Establish vision, mission, and guiding principles

Guided Implementation 2:

Call 1: Debrief line-of-business deep dive.
Call 2: Identify risks and inhibitors to your data strategy.

Guided Implementation 3:

Call 1: Define your data initiatives portfolio.
Call 2: Define your data strategies and key tactics.

Guided Implementation 4:

Call 1: Assess data initiative feasibility and prioritization.
Call 2: Rationalize your initiatives portfolio and align strategic value.
Call 3: Define your “big bet” and complete your strategy cards.

Guided Implementation 5:

Call 1: Summarize results and plan next steps.

Authors

Kassim Dossa

Steve Willis

Ryan Brunet

Contributors

Harjinder Nohal, Senior Manager, Strategy and Center of Excellence, IT, BDO Canada LLP
John Kemp, Executive Counselor, Global Services, Info-Tech Research Group
Reiaz Somji, Executive Counselor, Global Services, Info-Tech Research Group
Usman Lakhani, Principal Advisory Director, Info-Tech Research Group
Areez Elavia, Senior Workshop Director, Info-Tech Research Group
Andrea Malick , Principal Advisory Director, Info-Tech Research Group
Igor Ikonnikov, Advisory Fellow, Info-Tech Research Group
Steve Willis, Practice Lead – R&D, Info-Tech Research Group

Search Code: 108850
Last Revised: November 13, 2025

TAGS:

Professional services, professional services data strategy, utilization optimization, decision support in project delivery, time and billing data, firm data integration, fragmented billing systems, resource utilization visibility, real-time data in services firms, data strategy in billable models, partner buy-in for data strategy, Gen AI readiness in service firms