I recently started reading Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien’s Winning with Data; Tranform your Culture, Empower your People, and Shape the Future. For many us in the data management field, whether in Data Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Architecture, Database Administration, or even Software Engineering, understanding and extending the usage of data within your organization is an ever present, and sometimes contentious, goal that few organizations, if any, ever truly reach.
From my experience in data management, I think we have two major impediments preventing our organizations from achieving true data democratization. The first is a lack of real or near real-time data availability, where executives are using data in a reactionary manner vs’ a proactive business driver. Secondly, business verticals, which are the data owners with the organization, have to fight, beg, and sometimes even circumvent draconian data rules to access relevant data required to operate their business. While both of these impediments seem similar in nature, the first is the C-level 50,000 foot view used to make macro business decisions, the second is the ground level view used to make micro business vertical decisions. Think about like this: the former is the coach calling play, and the latter is hte quarterback deciding who to through the ball to. Ridding our companies and colleagues of these impediment is nothintg short of an uphill battle, and it all begins at the top.
Before one byte is passed through a pipeline, one data element is transformed, or one table created, our organizations must reinvent the way they view data. Historically, data was always seen as something of a byproduct of our business. Something that IT or federated BI developers has accesss to, and would provide to the C-Suite or our business leader in order to make reactive decisions based on what happened. The questions these leaders were asking all stemmed from “How does this happened” or “What are the lessons learned”, and never from I call the “coach’s perspective”. And while I don’t want to discount the importance of a business retrospective review, the path forward in today’s fast changing business world is about understanding what is happening now, and how we use our data to drive our organizational success.
The coach’s persective is all about using data, in real or near real-time, to tweak our business in the present moment; Messrs Tunguz and Bien call this “Achieving Data Enlightenment”. If we approach each business day with the attitude of a coach, who is constantly making in game adjustments, calling timeouts to review the game plan with his/her team, and always thinking multiple step ahead (the traditional if/then/else paradigm) all with a goal of “Winning the Game”, we can easily remove the first impediment to data democratization. In order to suceed in today’s busines environment, we must use our data proactively vs’ reactively to make decisions that enable our business’s sucess!
Arguably the most important impediment to considering data as a first class asset is the usage at the business vertical (or ground) level. Speaking from experience, business verticals are the last folks in our organizations to receive actionable data, whether in a dashboard, report, or the byproduct of some data science/analyst project. This is truly where the dounuts are made, however, they are making them with stale, out of date data as their main ingedient. In order for organizations to win with data, they must not only create real or near real-time data pipelines to become proactive decision makers, they must also release the chains of data access and put the data into the hands of the business professionals in order to maximize their business operations.
These data management impediments will not clear overnight. It will take many meetings, presentations, and water-cooler discussions to ultimately rig our organizations of these productivity road bloacks. However, persistence and determination will win the day.
Thank you for reading.
Cheers!
Jason