Abstract: In recent years, digital economy which views data as the key factor of production and digital technology as the core driving force, has become a new engine to promote the high-quality development of China’s economy. Under the wave of digital economy, more and more enterprises embark on their digital transformation journey by collecting and analyzing internal operations and external user data. However, in practice, only a few enterprises utilize big data to enable their business innovation and achieve performance growth. Most enterprises still face the dilemma of having data without performance. How to release the value of data to better improve the performance of enterprise digital transformation has become an important issue for both academia and practitioners. Existing studies have acknowledged the importance of data development and utilization to the digital transformation of enterprises, but it lacks in-depth analysis of its internal mechanism. As a process of organizational change, digital transformation is influenced by both organizational cognition and behavior. It requires managers to interpret data strategy from the cognitive level. Meanwhile, it also requires managers to implement data strategy from the behavior level. In this sense, from the cognitive perspective, along with the logic of “cognition-behavior-performance”, this study investigates the impact of data strategic cognition on the performance of enterprise digital transformation. This study uses questionnaire data to carry out empirical analysis. The results show that: (1) Data strategic cognition has a significant positive impact on the performance of enterprise digital transformation. Managers’ clear description and interpretation of data strategy helps to improve the performance of enterprise digital transformation. (2) The implementation of data strategy plays a partial intermediary role in the relationship between data strategic cognition and the performance of enterprise digital transformation. Managers’ clear understanding of data strategy helps to effectively decompose and implement of data strategic tasks in various functional departments, and improves the performance of enterprise digital transformation. (3) The diversity of data application scenarios strengthens the positive impact of data strategy implementation on the performance of digital transformation. Diverse data application scenarios can expand the sources of enterprise data and enrich the carrier of enterprise digital communication. This contributes to data sharing and process collaboration, and then promotes the performance of enterprise digital transformation. (4) The diversity of data application scenarios strengthens the intermediary effect of data strategy implementation. Diverse data application scenarios can help managers deepen their understanding of operational situation, and promote data strategy in the enterprise departments effectively as well as improve the efficiency of collaborative innovation among different business departments. This study contributes to developing a deeper understanding of the source of digital transformation performance, and provides theoretical guidance and practical inspiration for enterprises to improve their digital transformation performance by strengthening the strategic data management. During the process of digital transformation, enterprises should pay attention to strengthening managers’ cognitive training of data strategy to enhance their understanding of the value of data strategy and accelerate the cohesion of data strategic consensus. In addition, enterprises should strengthen the process management of data strategy implementation and promote the coordinated implementation of data strategy among various departments through the establishment of system norms and unified standards of data collection, storage and analysis. Moreover, to better release of data value and improve the performance of digital transformation of enterprises, the development of digital application scenarios should be promoted from single point breakthrough to the entire enterprise.