Getting started with Data Culture - Understanding your organisation

If there is one piece of advice 'today me' would give to my past self it would be this.

Data Culture is about people.

Data Culture is about people.

Data Culture is about people.

There is a reason why technology transformations the world over fail. In fact, around 70% of them according to McKinsey Research. The buy-in, understanding, commitment and involvement of people can never, not for a second, be secondary to technology when it comes to implementing a transformation.

People should always be the primary focus as a core part of any transformation. But how does this come together to influence culture?

Why is Rome different to Prague, different to London? There are many more similarities than differences and yet, different they are. Considerably so. Because culture compounds difference in a wonderful, positive way that makes each place unique and so culturally significant in their own right.

The same is true of organisations.

In this respect, ‘data culture’ simply becomes ‘culture’ because you cannot separate it from the business and structures that are in place. If you want to become a more data-driven business, then data must be a part of the everyday. It cannot be a part of something else, or somebody else’s problem. But it takes time to get there.

It can be really, really tempting to start a programme of work because things need to be done. Start now. Fail fast. Iterate. But it's easy to confuse activity with progress. Data Culture is about people. You cannot iterate a culture in the same way as you can when say, building a product.

It is not about ‘doing stuff’, it is about setting the direction of travel and then creating the conditions for success.

The first thing to do is understand the landscape. The data landscape was strong at LBG when I arrived. We had teams of data scientists, technologists, futurists and banking specialists. We are a 300+ year old business so we’re clearly doing something right.

Understand where you are, and where people are. What is the data culture as it exists today?

I invested A LOT of time in this up front.

Getting myself out there, meeting with as many stakeholders as I possibly could in my first 90 days.

In Lloyds this looked like...Business Unit Data Officers, Analytics Leaders, Data Architects, Business leaders, Risk teams, HR teams, Comms teams, Data Scientists, Data Engineers...you name it.

And spending such quality 1 on 1 time with such a wide range of stakeholders really helped me to understand data culture from their point of view. Even right down to actually defining what data culture meant to them and what they needed to be different to be successful in their own roles - and for their teams to really feel part of something.

Reflecting on those many conversations, here are the key things that kept coming up again and again:

• Data teams are well established but not interlinked across the different business units. Practitioners don't feel that sense of belonging - to one another, to their specialisms and to the bigger picture
• There is a strong desire for improving data literacy among a business audience but not a high level of clarity on exactly how they can do this
• Data leaders are keen to lean into early career hiring opportunities but unsure how to really make the most of them
• Data practitioners want to be ‘in the driving seat’ of their career progression but aren't fully clear on what’s available to them and where the best place to invest their time is according to where they are on their journey
• Data value stories are not heavily promoted. As a result, some business leaders are unsure what success looks like in the data space

It is likely a similar story at most large corporate entities where silos can form irrespective of design and the focus on ‘doing the work’ can end up stifling.

A question then to my fellow data culture colleagues and comrades - where did you start?

#buildwithculture

Next up... Designing a data culture vision and operating model in line with stakeholder needs...