Your Big Data Needs a Mission Statement

Lauren Maffeo?is a service designer at Steampunk and a member of the Technology Advisory Council at the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Her first book,?Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, is available in beta through The Pragmatic Programmers.

When I was a research analyst at Gartner, I surveyed several hundred employees at North American businesses with 500 or fewer employees. I wanted to learn how they used data to make business decisions and how confident (or not) they were in doing so. I also wanted to know if having tools and colleagues devoted to data increased employee confidence in using this data to make business decisions.

Across the sectors surveyed, I found the following facts:

• Employing data scientists makes business leaders more confident that they have the right data and insights to make business decisions.
• Companies with full-time employees who analyze data also use business intelligence (BI) software more often.
• Business leaders that use BI software rate the data-based decisions they make as more impactful.
• A positive correlation exists between how confident people are in their data decision-making and how important they believe data is to their businesses.

Two things struck me as I reviewed these results. The first is that investing in tools and employees to govern data improves business outcomes. The businesses that feel most comfortable with data are the same ones that create roles devoted to governing it. They also invest in software and other data science tools to help employees govern said data.

That said, it is equally important for businesses to decentralize their data. This involves giving each team leader, even those in non-technical roles, the autonomy to own data within their domain. Whether you manage a sales team or a hospital, leaders across all lines of business should be empowered to boost their teams’ outcomes using data. It helps everyone contribute to the bigger business picture.

If you aim to achieve these outcomes, you’ll need to do some foundational work first, and that work doesn’t start with data. To use data effectively, start by clarifying why your business exists. Put another way, ask yourself this question:

“What’s my company’s mission statement?”

I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t it obvious what my company does? Why do I need to bother writing it down, let alone writing a mission statement?”

Here’s the thing: you likely do know what your business does on a daily basis. Hopefully, you know how your own role fulfills that work as well. If you’re a CTO, that means you manage the purchase decisions and rollouts of all tech across your organization. On any given day, you assess security risks, report updates to stakeholders, and research ways to improve your company’s IT.

Now, ask yourself why these daily tasks are part of your job. As CTO, you’re responsible for managing all aspects of your company’s technology. Your mission is to ensure that all the technology your company uses and deploys, internally and externally, advances company goals. If you’re unsure whether a specific technology or strategy helps achieve these goals, it’s time to revisit your company’s mission. How can you ensure that you're making the right decisions without knowing what your business’s north star is?

This might sound like a philosophical exercise that you can’t spare time for. Time and money constraints can prevent senior leaders from asking these questions as often as they should. But without knowing the answers to these questions, you can’t affect meaningful change in your role.

Likewise, without knowing why your business wants to invest in data projects, you won't write a successful plan to govern data over the long term. You can’t use data to grow revenue, improve products, increase customer satisfaction scores, or lower supply chain costs without knowing how data impacts your company’s mission. And if you can't explain why you want to invest resources in data efforts, you'll waste time and money that could be spent elsewhere.

So, the first step on your path to using data is to ensure that you know your company’s mission statement. If you're unsure what your organization's mission statement is, this is your cue to ask senior leadership. You’re searching for a single sentence that captures why your company exists, and how its existence adds value to the world.?If you look up some of the world’s most famous brands, you’ll find succinct statements of purpose:

• Warby Parker: "To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses."
• Workday: "To put people at the center of enterprise software."
• Tesla: "To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy."
• TED: "Spread ideas."
• Invisible Children: "To end violence and exploitation facing our world's most isolated and vulnerable communities."

These brands have clear reasons for existing. They know the unique value they bring and what they aim to offer the world. If these famous brands are also exceptional companies, they ensure that every team member knows why they exist, and how these mission statements drive each colleague's daily work. If TED’s Head of Product knows that the brand’s mission is to spread ideas, they’ll approach their product management work through that lens.

Now, it's time to take the mission statement concept one step further. Let's review Warby Parker's mission statement through a data-focused lens:

• How might Warby Parker use data to offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price?
• What data would they need to achieve this goal?
• Why do they need this specific data to achieve their mission?
• Who would collect, clean, and manage this data?
• Where would these colleagues store the data? An on-premise server? An Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment? Neither?

With those questions in mind, apply the same data-focused lens to your own company’s mission statement. This clarity will help you answer a crucial question: “What’s the point of using data at all?”

To write a mission statement for data, clarify how you want data to enhance your business in one or two written sentences. The more specific you can be, the better. It’s not enough to say, “Our company will give all teams the tools and training they need to make data-based decisions.”

Instead, try something like this:

“Our organization will enable all team leads to access data within [BI/analytics software of choice, like Tableau]. This will empower everyone to achieve our shared business goal of increasing customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent by 2025.”

The urge to move fast, break things, and rush to the end is real. But finishing strong involves knowing three things: What the end is, why you need to reach it, and how data will help. The end of each year is the perfect time to start planning for the future.

As we inch closer to 2023, take advantage of this relative quiet and try writing your own mission statement for data use. When you begin with the end in mind, you sail ahead of the curve.