Will Data Leaders Learn From The Travails Of Their Predecessors?

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, entitled?Why Do Chief Data Officers Have Such Short Tenures? , I discuss, along with my co-authors Tom Davenport and recruiting executive Josh King, the challenges that major companies are facing in establishing the Chief Data Officer (CDO) role and the brevity of current tenures in the position.?We draw an analogy to the early days of the Chief Information Officer role, noting, “Thirty years ago, a widely repeated joke was that CIO — the abbreviation for Chief Information Officer — really meant “career is over.”?

?We go on to note in the HBR article that, “The CDO job doesn’t have to be so unstable. We believe there are ways that its value can be made more apparent, and for benefits to be delivered quickly enough to prolong job tenures. A clearer definition of the role and a focus on business rather than technology can also help.”?This also implies that corporations and data leaders would behoove themselves to learn lessons from the past and from their predecessors.

Now more than ever, data matters and good data matters tremendously.?This is the central theme that I explore in my soon to be published book,?Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI ?(August 31; Wiley).?How have companies and large organizations responded to the proliferation of new sources and unprecedented volumes of data in recent decades, and what can we learn to make us better and smarter going forward??What distinguishes those companies that have differentiated themselves from their competition?

There are no simple solutions or easy answers.?Becoming data-driven is a sustained journey that unfolds over time.?It is not always a straight line.?Even the most focused and disciplined organizations experience missteps.?Long-term success requires steadfast commitment.?I offer several recommendations drawn from a generation of observation and experience.?

Possessing a flexible mindset is essential.?Companies must learn to think different, experiment, and try new approaches.?As the legendary Apple marketing campaign proclaimed, “Here’s to the crazy ones. The ones who see things differently.?They change things.?They push the human race forward.?And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.?Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”?Data traditionally flows across an organization without a single ownership point.?As a consequence, organizations need to think different and develop new organizational models to manage data and derive business value from data as an enterprise business asset.?

Companies and data leaders must be prepared to fail fast and learn faster.?In its early years, Facebook adopted the aggressive mantra of “Move fast and break things.”??This shoud not imply that mainstream corporations take unnecessary or imprudent risks.?Quite to the contrary.?However, leading companies, and data leaders can adopt approaches such as test-and-learn and the deployment of centers of excellence, analytics sandboxes, and incubation labs to evaluate new approaches and identify breakthrough opportunities.?Those companies that fail to plan for a data-driven future run the risk of being left far behind.

Complacency is the enemy of leadership.?I advise companies and data leaders that I work with again and again that the great and near-great never take their leadership for granted.?They are never complacent, never self-satisfied, never believing that they “have it all figured out” or that “we have everything under control”.?Great leaders are always looking over their shoulders and focusing on how they can be better.?Today’s leader that is standing still may be tomorrows roadkill, doomed to obsolescence.

Focus on long-term business value.?Rome was not built in a day, and neither are data-driven leaders.?Companies and data-leaders must view becoming data-driven as a process and a journey.?Organizations must have a plan and a strategy that they systematically revisit and adapt on an ongoing basis.?Efforts must be sustained.?Business value must be paramount.?Focus on one critical business question at a time.?Show results that demonstrate measurable business value.?Build credibility.?Move to the next question.?Create momentum.???These steps will help business sponsors develop trust in the data and establish the foundation for a close collaboration between data leaders and their business counterparts.

Advice is simple.?Execution is a much greater challenge.?Great data leaders must learn from the travails of those who have come before them and paved well-worn paths through trial and error.?Data will continue to proliferate in new forms and ever accelerating quantities.?The Chief Data Officer has emerged as a trusted and essential member of the corporate C-suite.?The data profession will only continue to grow.?The demand for data is not going away for the foreseeable decades.?Data is here to stay, today and well into the future.

We concluded our HBR article with this counsel from Proctor & Gamble Chief Data and Analytics Officer Guy Peri, “I’m a business leader who brings deep digital, data, and analytics expertise to help transform and grow our business.” We added, “When the data management and architecture component is primary and the business objectives secondary, that’s when CDOs struggle.”

Karl Marx famously stated in?The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”?This does not have to be the outcome for data leaders.?I have witnessed first-hand the mixed results of a generation of efforts by leading corporations and their data leaders to harness the power of data to make better decisions.?Data leaders must learn from past mistakes and the avoid oft-repeated pitfalls.?Successful organizations will build upon the learnings and experiences of their predecessors.

After a generation of data initiatives,?only 24.0% ?of leading companies report that they have created a data-driven organization.?This represents a tremendous opportunity for data leaders in the years ahead to deliver on the unfulfilled promise that has become the norm for many organizations.?Data leaders must not fall victim to hubris.?Business leaders have seen their share of overly ambitious data initiatives over the decades, however well-intentioned.?They have grown tired of “yet another data project”.?Doomed efforts have created a justifiable skepticism and aversion among business leaders who have become accustomed to magnified claims that fail to deliver business value.

To be successful, data leaders must put themselves in the shoes of business leaders to develop sponsorship and trust to prove that they share a common business goal – to help the organization grow, to serve customers better, to deliver services more cost-effectively, and to create new services and enter new markets based on data insights, knowledge, and actions.?Together, data and business leaders must break the bonds of the past and drive new business momentum.?This is the mindset that will distinguish those data leaders and organizations that learn from the past, move forward with organizational support and confidence, and stake a claim on the future, from those who fail to learn from history and wind up condemned to repeat it.