Technology And Analytics

Build
Systems Betterto Management
Put Your Data to
Work
by Thomas C. Redman
June 30, 2022

Jorg Greuel/Getty Images

Summary.   If you look under the hood of most company’s data strategy — if they
have one, that is — you’ll find that most data is woefully unmanaged. It’s unclear
how data is meant to be used and who is responsible for it. Businesses must craft
better systems and approaches to... more

Most companies continue to struggle in managing their data and

putting it to work. They expend a lot of time and energy, but don’t
get much for their efforts. Quality is low, people don’t trust the
data, technical debt is out-of-control, and they miss opportunities
to become data-driven, take advantage of advanced analytics and
AI, and compete with data. Indeed, most organizations are simply
not attuned to the rigors of working with data.

This, of course, is a problem. At this point, practically everyone’s

job involves using, interpreting, and creating data. Yet somehow
this seems to get lost at all levels of organizations — the structure,
the culture, the people. It’s often unclear whose responsibility
data is (the CDO? IT? Everyone? No one?), and because data tend
to be hidden, in customer orders, logistics, and management
reports, the power of the status quo prevails. Without clear
expectations, chaos reigns. People don’t know what to do, basic
tasks are left undone, and much of the work that is undertaken is
done poorly. The unfortunate reality: more often than not, data is
essentially unmanaged.

Businesses must craft better systems and approaches to working

with data, and that starts with clarifying management
responsibilities for everyone who touches data in any way, across
the entire company. Here are five guidelines for deciding who
should do what when it comes to data.

Get everyone involved. Most of the real data action involves

“regular people,” who don’t have “data” in their titles. They create
the stuff; interpret the stuff; use the stuff to satisfy customers and
regulators, keep track of inventory and money, and make plans
and decisions, and so forth. These people are effectively the front
line of any larger data project, program, or strategy, and are
essential to its function. Yet they’re almost always left out at the
planning stage. Given the excitement about big data, artificial
intelligence, and digital transformation, you might be surprised
that including regular people is the single most important step
companies can take to accelerate their data programs.

There’s huge potential here. To unleash it, companies need to

clarify regular people’s roles and responsibilities, as data
customers and creators when it comes to data quality, as small
data scientists, as contributors to larger data projects, as better
decision-makers, and as guardians of the company’s data. The
first step leaders should take is putting regular people and these
responsibilities front and center. They must also follow through,
training and supporting people to help them become effective in
their newly articulated responsibilities.

Build the infrastructure to work above, around, and through

siloes. While companies reap the most value from data when it’s
used across departments, siloes get in the way of the data sharing.
Despite the fact that almost everyone depends on data created by
other departments to do their jobs (e.g., sales uses lead data
generated by marketing, and then passes sales data on to
operations for fulfillment, and so on), departments are often
unconcerned with the quality of data they pass on. Companies are
gigantic daisy chains of data flows, and when bad data gets passed
along, it mucks up everything.

For better or worse, silos probably aren’t going anywhere soon.

Rather companies must build infrastructure that can transmit
and coordinate the flow of a lot of data in an organized way —
what I call “fat, organizational pipes” — to contend with them.
First, companies need to define and manage data supply chains.
Just as companies track the producers and raw materials, they
rely on to manufacture and deliver physical products, they should
define and track how data is created, how it moves from one place
to another, and how it is analyzed and used along the way.

Second, they need to build a data science bridge, which supports

communication between business teams and data science centers
of excellence. These two teams often find themselves at cross
purposes, as the former tries to build predictable processes and
the latter tries to disrupt that stability to find improvements,
update decision making, and develop new products. The bridge
aims to ease this tension, by helping both teams understand the
concerns and needs of the other.

Third, they need to create shared language between departments

and across the company. As companies grow and departments
specialize, the language used diverges. (E.g., the term “customer”
comes to mean “prospect” to marketing, “person with sign-off
authority” to sales, and “entity ultimately responsible for paying
the bill” to risk management.) This makes it difficult for people to
work across silos and for data scientists to make sense of the
company’s data. Companies can make huge strides by identifying
roughly 150 key concepts that bind the company together, and
agreeing on common definitions.

Let IT do tech, not data. Too many companies wrongly assign

principal responsibility for data to their Information Technology
departments. But most data is neither created nor used by IT —
technology and data are different kinds of assets, in much the
same way streaming services and movies are different.
Companies should let IT do tech, building infrastructure
capabilities, automating well-defined processes, and, in time,
reducing technical debt.

Charge professional data teams with coaching and coordinating.

Companies need small, professional data teams with deep
expertise in a range of topics, including data quality, data science,
metadata management, privacy, and security to drive home these
responsibilities day-in and day-out. As explained in a previous
article, perhaps half of these data teams’ effort should be aimed at
training and helping regular people so they can step into the roles
and discharge the responsibilities discussed above.  Professional
assistance is also needed to help those charged with managing
data supply chains and establishing shared language.  A network
of embedded data managers is essential to increase the reach of
professional data teams in conducting this work.

Professional data teams must also reserve some fraction of their

time for specialist work — interpreting privacy regulations,
developing data models, and leading especially tough or
important data science initiatives (although these efforts must
also involve regular people).

Get senior leadership off the sidelines. Over the past generation,
terrific methods of data science and data quality have proven
their mettle in countless circumstances, solving difficult
problems, yielding new insights into customers, and driving costs
down. Still, it has proven difficult to introduce these new ideas
into companies and to extend successes in one part of a company
to others; the failure rate of data science projects remains
disturbingly high. Data programs are in dire need of senior
leadership to help resolve these problems. Yet by and large, senior
leaders have sat on the sidelines.

It appears to me that senior leaders want to do the right things,

they just don’t know what the right things are. In their defense,
they face a confused deluge of proposals, all of which promise
dire consequences if ignored, but each of which offers different
recommendations. Separating the signal from the noise is a tall
order.

With that in mind, I advise leaders to initially focus on two things.

First, is making connections: Companies are loaded with business

problems/opportunities and with great ideas in the data space.
But too often they fail to find one another — the business
problems remain unsolved and those with great ideas grow
frustrated. Senior leaders are singularly well-placed to connect
the two.

Second is building, over time, the people capabilities called for

here. If you’ve not done so already, hire a great Chief Data Officer,
one with the courage of a lion to stand on the front lines of change
everyday, and with the patience of a saint, to think long-term and
not get distracted by petty sniping.

 . . . 

These guidelines represent a sea change in the way data is

managed today. Some will say they are way too hard or not worth
the trouble. But data management today is simply not getting the
job done. From my vantage point, it’s foolish to think that simply
bolting on a data science center of excellence would lead to
industry-changing insights, that a few raw PhDs, could change
the minds of a generation used to managing by the seats of their
 pants and pantsuits, or that applying the latest whiz-bang
technology would make up for the failure to manage data
properly for a full generation.

Electrification provides a useful example. For electricity did not

appear on the scene and magically make everything better.
Leaders and technicians had to sort out how to make and deliver
it safely, how to change the shop floor to accommodate it, how to
deal with its fussy properties, and how to get everyone doing their
parts! This took a full generation. We should expect no less for
data.

Thomas C. Redman, “the Data Doc,” is

President of Data Quality Solutions. He helps
companies and people, including start-ups,
multinationals, executives, and leaders at all
levels, chart their courses to data-driven
futures. He places special emphasis on quality,
analytics, and organizational capabilities.

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