C Level Leaders - why is your data team letting you down?

There are business leaders - the C suite.

There are data leaders - CDO, CDAO, Head of Data, Head of Analytics and the rest.

Where these players are in sync and supporting each other, great things happen.

In every other organisation, value is being lost because the tribe running the organisation; and the data tribe aren’t aligned.

I’ve previously shared guidance for data teams to improve their buy in. Some of it can be found here.

Now let’s look from the leadership side. Two of their key complaints about data teams are their cost and the lack of available resource.

Constant request for spend, with no clear Return on Investment

The data team are always coming up with requests to buy new tooling at significant expense.

Why do we need a Data Quality tool when we already know that our data is lousy!

The marketing people request spend by showing me what the likely return on my investment is. And then I can review afterwards if that was the case.

The sales team can show me that additional people can cover new regions or sectors, and again I can review if that worked out.

The data team can’t do that.

Why?

Because you’re comparing it to the wrong teams.

Every decent firm has a CFO (and team) to make sure that the money is managed correctly.

Do we ask for an RoI on preparing management accounts?

Every decent firm has an HR function to manage the people.

Do we ask for an RoI on HR policies?

Data is one of the most significant assets that a firm has.

The more you look after it, the more value you can generate from it.

We can’t find good people

There are many good recruiters specialising in data, but supply still exceeds demand and it will be a few more years before all the graduates and entry-level data colleagues have reached leadership level.

(And let’s not start on asking for people with more years experience in a technology, than that technology has existed for…)

You need to be creative, and you are rarely going to find a perfect solution.

First up - if you want to start or restart your data initiative, then that requires effective change management and stakeholder engagement, as well as sorting out the technology and the policies, processes and guidance.

That’s a different skill set to running established data management activities over time.

So consider short-term or contract engagement to do the former (yes I’m talking about dataZED) and then the requirements list for your long term (ideally permanent) data manager because much more achievable.

Second - your data people need to be knowledgeable about your industry and your business, as well as about data management.

Three out of three would be amazing. But is hard to find. And expensive.

Can you get someone with two of the three, or even one? The rest can be taught (and in a second plug for dataZED, I have worked with clients to coach some “oners” and “twoers”).

Third - when I started doing this work in the early 2010s. the approach was to start in a manual way, relying on people, with a view to automating or buying in technology as the activity matured.

For example, Data Dictionaries would start off in Excel (or Word if you were unlucky; or SharePoint if you were flash) before aspiring to buy a tool like Collibra.

That’s changed now. People are expensive and tools are relatively cheap. Moreover, the automations and accelerators in the modern data suite mean that starting slowly and manually is really a false economy.

(Is it time for another dataZED plug? We do RFPs as well.)

All in all, finding good people is hard. But there are ways to mitigate that.

TL; DR

If you are C-level leader frustrated by the data team’s constant requests for spend and for more people, then you should be:

• Viewing data spend as for other business operational functions such as that on Finance or HR.

• Thinking creatively about resourcing, such as short term contractor or consulting support; then bringing in people from non-standard backgrounds; and by using technology to reduce the need for people to carry out manual data management work.

And if you would like to have a chat/vent/sob with me about data at your organisation , then my diary is open here.

Have a wonderful week,
Charles

Follow ups:

• Learn and network at the next dataZED Get Together 

• Download my guide to Kicking off Data Governance 

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