What is a Data-Driven Enterprise - The #IntelligentBusiness

We hear competing messages around whether organisations want to be data-driven, data-powered, data-enabled or even data-supported.

Personally, I prefer the term 'Data Driven' as it indicates a business that has moved away from Opinion based decision making, BUT....

• The reality is different sources of data can be contradictory, and gathering of 'evidence' can often be massively skewed by opinions. We can all see Governments and Businesses can be hugely influenced by one specific 'high profile' event, which may have embarrassed one of more members of the Executive and leads them to make a decision which is not supported by the majority of data, rather it reflects a response to the court of public opinion. As politicians say (but don't practice), public opinion makes for bad policy....

Coming back to reality, most strategic decisions in a business are driven on the back of financial goals, which implies they are derived from data... or does it?

• Does your business still have a culture where goals and measures are largely arbitrary, and/or based on say 5/10/20% improvement from prior years or an implication of say 50/100% increase in revenue/profit over the next 3/5 years.
• Do you have lots of different people processing and analysing sub-sets of data in Microsoft Excel (other tools are available) to provide insights and recommendations to their leadership teams... and somehow different leaders with 'in theory' access to all the same data come up with different evidence and recommendations?

All of us, have experienced these or similar challenges, resulting in reduced or inferior performance for the business??? Addressing this for me is basically 1, 2, 3. I...

1. want to gather as much evidence as I can about a topic and use that 'data' to inform the decisions I make.
2. know through evidence that human beings are very bad decision makers (my/their opinion or public opinion matters too much...), so I will look for ways and means (analytics) to process the data, in order to get options and recommendations for what decision I should be making based on the data.
3. want to get that regularly and/or repeatedly I will be looking at mechanisms (Machine Learning/AI) to continually improve and enhance decisions based on ongoing collection of data.

In all of that, I don't necessarily need to collect some or all of the data myself, nor do I need to have the mathematical and statistical skills to develop Analytics using Data Science or the coding skills to turn my machine learning into industrialised software. What I need to know is that there are reliable (Governed) sources of information around the business.

• Information - data that is regularly curated and maintained
• Sources - there can be (and in reality for any sizeable organisation) there will always be more than one database, content store, data lake... source of that information. again the critical point is that the data is governed, curated and maintained so that whilst all the data might not be in one place, there are not different versions of the same data in different places. For example Finance may have a data warehouse containing all financial transaction data, and whilst Sales/Marketing may not access the Finance source, they will have their own source which is fed by a sub-set of the same financial data.
• Governed - there need to be people in the business who are actually accountable for the data. On a day to day basis, people who are close to the use of the data need to ensure it's quality (usually with the support of some software tools), but ultimately the Executive need to ensure they have some form of senior leadership committee (with delegated authorities) that works with the overall Data Leader and Legal/General Counsel to ensure that data is controlled across the entire business, and legal responsibilities are met.

I have explicitly defined Information, Sources and Governance as that gets to the heart of having the Data that an organisation can be driven by! To enable that the data needs to be well understood, maintained and defined.

That does take us 'down the rabbit hole' of why too many Data initiatives and Data Leaders fail! They as the Data Leader, care too much about the Data and not enough about how it will be used!

• How the Data will be used, should be the #1 priority for any Data Leader. Data Leaders should talk to other Business Leaders about their problems, challenges and then how Data (& Analytics) can be used to help them address (or not) those problems, challenges and create opportunities! Together they should identify the value that can be generated and take joint accountability for delivering it.
• Data Leaders should talk to IT and Legal about how the data will be stored, governed and controlled, with a synopsis provided to a Board or Audit Committee to advise them that things are under control!
• Data Leaders talk to the whole business about building a Data Culture, so that everyone is able to use Data and Analytical tools and sees the benefits the they can enable through ensuring good data is available across the business. And
• Data Leaders empower their teams to drive the data management, governance and delivery of data science, machine learning and AI to help the business with the business problems and opportunities that they have jointly identified.

Ergo as a Data Leader I spend less of my time worrying about the mechanics of managing the data and analytics and more about ensuring that my colleagues in the Top Management and Senior Leadership are aware that it's all under control, and more about how we can help them to drive value from data in their part of the organisation/their customers.

• This is the lesson for any Leader (but particularly for those Heads of Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Governance who aspire to be executive CDO/CDAOs). You must know enough about what your team do in order to drive a strategy, build the team and bring their capabilities to the rest of the organisation. Being a fantastic Data Scientist does not qualify you to be on the Executive Team, instead your focus is really on connecting with other Executives and enabling your team to make a difference and facilitating the delivery, rather than doing it yourself!

When everyone in the organisation is following my 3 step process, contributing to and using the curated source of data and using that information to inform and drive their decisions and enabling them to be industrialised through AI/ML... -Then the business is Data Driven, and most likely is out performing its competition!