In my previous post around becoming a data driven organization I explained how doing so can be of immense benefit to any organization. It enables far better decision making at all levels of your business. Having said that it is a very challenging proposition to turn an organization set in its' ways and its' decision making processes. In this post I want to highlight some of the early challenges and how you can tackle them to bring about positive changes. Having had over thirty six years experience in the world of Information Technology and having served in every role under the sun in IT I can categorically state that getting your leadership and regular employees to understand Data and Data Architecture is one of the biggest hurdles any business may face. While leadership recognizes the need for IT, more often than not the regular employees are removed from the inner workings of the IT shop within a business the regular employee remains focused on their day to day tasks and little else (rightly so as we are all given our share of the workload and any slack brings on fears of being made redundant).

So, how can we get regular staff to understand that Data is everyone's responsibility? Simple answer is; through education and practice. At the same time you will need to accept that Data management and practices must be embraced by leadership in an organization as well as a practical investment. At the beginning of the education process you must begin with leadership and explain the benefits of making more informed decisions.

Assuming leadership is willing to embrace this picking a few examples of recent decisions where limited information or Data was made available at the time, and use the 'hindsight' method. By simply asking the decision maker 'What they would have done differently in hindsight?' should get the discussion focusing on what better information at the time may have meant. It is always best to start with any and all practical examples to demonstrate the power of good Data for decision making. When the decision makers come to the realization that instinct and good Data combined can derive the best results resistance to pushing the Data education barrow if made far easier.

Hopefully, leadership arrives at the usual place when they want some business benefit quantified, 'How much?', 'How long?', and 'What can we expect in return?' are the next series of discussion pieces.

The answers to all of these are something like the following; "Becoming Data driven in your decision making journey starts today now that you are interested in making better business decisions.", "All that is required is a small investment in terms of a percentage of key staffers time" and "Good news, within weeks you will have a current state mapped out, and the gaps in knowledge will become clear.".

At the outset you will need Data stewards and/or Data champions in key areas of the business that will spend several hours per week familiarizing themselves in the types of information or Data being used in their respective areas of responsibility. And to begin at a very high level to map their line of business information based on criticality and sensitivity and location (it may be physical and/or digital). Those staffers that have experience within the business will recognize and be able to call out the vast majority of key information or Data assets as well as where to find them. Data Stewards/Champions/Owners are critical to your start. Without them you will be relying on IT systems only which are just part of the overall Data management picture for an organization.

Once you have a handle on the Data that is critical to business operations across all business lines you have your start. This should take a couple of weeks so make sure you have regular sessions with your champions. Start talking risk and risk mitigations as the resulting Data Classification should match a businesses risk profile very closely. All of the input will need to compliment any IT Tools such as Microsoft SQL, Informatica, etc. in order to build a repository of knowledge (another essential element for the end result of reporting back to leadership around current state). Being able to show your business contacts a visual representation of how their Data appears in the systems and applications they use will go a long way to gaining a mapping of where and what Data resides in the various business areas. Simple criticality exercises will assist in identifying key types of Data. What is the risk to the business without the Data or information needs to be understood going forward. Don't get bogged down in trying to map everything keep tasks and outputs to a simple high level to begin with.

Now you should have a high level view of the major and most critical types of Data or information the business is using day in day out. Then run a quick sensitivity exercise to determine how sensitive that information or Data is to the business. Once you have done this first pass of identification, mapping and categorizing you have your first Data Classification result.  This can be visualized through a risk matrix style table which is easy for leadership to consume and understand. Being able to demonstrate the insights into the day to day Data or information being used is the key to overcoming the first challenge of buy in from leadership and/or sponsors of education in this space. 

Communicating where the organizations maturity and what the gaps are will help with the next challenge, finding a great use case to explore where you can demonstrate the value of understanding the Data or information interactions which drive decision making. Your business sponsors/champions will be the best to advise on what such a use case may be. For example, your business may be about selling widgets and deliveries are not timely leading to loss of customers and in turn revenue. Manual handling of information is fuelling this problem. So, how can better Data management practices help out here? Simple, if we know where widget production is at all times and sales at all times combined with the logistics around delivery we can determine using evidence where the processing is potentially causing delays. By matching the various bits of information we can gain insights on how to correct negative events in future, thus preventing negative outcomes using evidence to drive where to focus valuable time and effort (both from technology and the business areas). This is where the Data Lake I mentioned in my previous post becomes a valuable asset as we are exploring potentially vague aspects of your organizations inner workings. Through combining multiple Data sources and inputs ranging from IT systems to business staff manual or automated offline content (recorded in non-IT systems) we may use all that Data to run hypotheticals to explore what may be going on in order to shed light on what may be critical disconnects.

Taking a structured approach to compiling and mapping and exploring Data is the best way to overcome the early challenges, and be sure to demonstrate or play back what you find will put you in good stead for subsequent phases. This is just the beginning of a much bigger exercise but you have to get the education process going in order to realize lasting results. Stay tuned for the next instalment where I talk more about some of the challenges faced when transforming your organization.