Building a data driven organisation ... are we serious about it?

A month ago, I had the pleasure to attend my first physical event post covid in London. First and foremost, Tableau did a brilliant job in organizing the Tableau Conference executive event simultaneously in London, Paris and Munich.

In this article, I will first share great insights from this event, then I will give my view on where we should be now. Indeed, it’s very frustrating, for someone who has been in the data market for the past 23 years, to see the same level of discussion about what have we missed in our organisations, and to continue to see that data, for many, is only a support rather than a real business asset. Let me elaborate.

First of all, a great and courageous statement from Simon who highlighted that to be data driven is good in paper but difficult in practice. During the round table, we didn’t have much insight on how to make this happen, but in my point of view the best quote was from Clive who mentioned that “data is an asset and should be seen as a core function like Finance or HR”. By the way, if you don’t know who Simon and Clive are, you should have come to this event. More seriously, please put a comment below if you want to be introduced.

I will push Clive’s idea even further. I think the main reason why our businesses are not clearly data driven is because data leaders are not part of the leadership team. Most of the CEOs I’ve met in my career believe that data is very important but data is not a “core” function for the business. Why? For me, the big majority of our leaders still continue to operate like their elders, and changing a classical operating model will need some courage. In the panel, again it has been mentioned that the problem in our businesses is the middle layer as they are not digital native, relying on their spreadsheets and their little data cottage. To be honest I don’t believe the “middle layer” is the problem, I think if the CEO has the courage to put the data in the center, the data leader would have a chance to elaborate an efficient way to manage data assets, and then data silos would disappear. If businesses keep considering the data function as an IT support and not as a core function of their business, data leaders will continue to struggle and we will have this same debat over and over again which is completely unproductive and pointless.

I strongly think that data must have a central and pivotal role for any business. Data leaders should never sit in IT nor sit in the business, they should report directly to the CEO. Data has to be in the center, be impartial and support value driven projects. Also, data has to be proactive by generating impactful insights. In order to enable a data driven business, data leaders should drive the data culture, help to make everyone data literate, as indeed most people are data illiterate and data leaders should be very realistic about it. Furthermore, data is a critical asset that has to be managed correctly as many businesses and many leaders don’t understand the concept of data governance which again shows that data is seen as a commodity.

This is the reason why I am very proud of the vision we have at EON Next. Our startup company has a visionary leader who believes and understands that data is critical and puts the data leader into the core leadership team. It is so important that businesses are starting to understand seriously that to build a data driven company it will not come without a change of culture and it will need some level of patience. I really hope that this article will help data leaders to take this step further and then have more interesting conversations during our next conferences.