Learning to Unlearn

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Background

A few weeks back, as one of the speakers at the DAMA Georgia Chapter meeting, I had an opportunity to share my experience in defining and executing “Enterprise Data Strategy and Extracting Data Value.” As I was explaining our Data Strategy process, and based on some of the questions from the audience, I realized that one of the main reasons for our success can be attributed to “unlearning”. As Master Yoda said in Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back - "You must unlearn what you have learned".

Traditionally, our Business Intelligence initiatives executed everything by the book. We followed a structured PMO/Waterfall methodology, did data modeling with star and snowflake schemas, designed data models with facts and dimensions, implemented governance and stringent change control processes. We had a large team with significant investment spent over a decade on the top BI Reporting tool, the top ETL tool, and the most widely used relational database.

In spite of all this, we weren’t reaching entitlement and we were always behind the eight ball in meeting the expectations of our business users, which was very frustrating to say the least.

Making a Pivot

Three years ago, we decided that we needed to do something drastically different. Our organization was going through a significant transformation in the new world of customer-driven growth, industrial internet, startups, big data, and mobile apps.

We went back to the drawing board and defined the data strategy starting with a clean slate.

This turned out to be a more difficult exercise than it initially seemed. Yes, we had a great opportunity to start from scratch, which is very rare in many large organizations. We were very comfortable in our old ways. The first couple of versions of our data strategy slides looked pretty much the same as before – old wine in a new bottle.

This did not align with how our organization dynamics had changed (refer my earlier topic: Organization Dynamics & Data Strategy). We really had to forget what we had learned about data management. We started to question each and every principle we had historically internalized and explored if we could throw it away and do something different or something completely opposite.

We looked at the mindset of how start-ups worked and evaluated how to capture those principles and thought processes.

The enterprise data strategy that came out of these efforts was completely different and did not look anything like the old. We have had this strategy in place for the past three years. We are pleasantly surprised with the results as we saw this strategy bear fruit in significantly expanding our data footprint and exponentially increasing adoption by our business users while achieving tangible business outcomes.

Is there an unlearning strategy?

This article does not specify any unlearning strategy as we did not specifically have one. What enabled us to undergo this transformation is the change in culture that started from the top and flowed down into all levels of the organization. ‘Bureaucracy’ was out and ‘Simplification’ was in. We were also driving to expand our business by exploring new opportunities in the ‘Industrial Internet’ space with a start-up mentality. All this fostered an environment that enabled us to ‘Unlearn’ quickly.

We don’t think unlearning will stop here. The future will bring more frequent business transformations and we need to be prepared to be able to quickly unlearn and adapt to the shifting paradigms. We are curious to understand if there are other organizations who have gone through similar transformations and could share best practices on tackling and speeding up this unlearning process.

Next Article: Data Governance - A Balancing Act

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and should not be attributed to the author's employer.

Edition: 1(17-Aug-16)