As promised this is the next post in my series of becoming data driven in decision making regardless of the nature of your business. It has been proven time and time again that businesses which are making decisions based on good data or good quality information are generally going to out perform their competitors that are relying on individuals opinions or gut instincts. While it is great to have a good innate sense of how to improve or grow your business there is no replacement for quality empirical evidence to guide your moves. This particular post is about the next phase of challenges you will encounter when transforming beyond the initial efforts to discover, map and classify the key Data or information being used day in day out to run your business. While it is essential to gain the sponsorship from senior stakeholders you will need to be able to sustain their buy in while growing the acceptance of driving out the discovery and categorizing efforts to come (beyond the initial work to establish a current state of Data or information).
There is a plethora of advice out there around how you can move from individual centric to Data driven decision making the things you won't read about are the many challenges you will face. It is overly simplistic to simply state you conduct a few workshops, introduce a clever tool or two to map your Data and then provide similar BI (Business Intelligence) tools and viola you are done. It is far more complicated because you need to get all the people in an organization interested and excited about how becoming data driven will improve their workplace and help make the business they work for more prosperous.
The truth of the matter is that people and processes will all need to change to take advantage of the transition to being Data driven. For that amount of change care must be taken as the journey moves from initial stages to actual implementation stages. Beyond the initial sell to senior stakeholders you will come up against a lot of resistance from those who have been operating with limited Data for their decision making during their day to day work. Those potentially protecting their patch in the workplace or those who have been ignored in the past. As well as those who are simply too busy to give you their time. Unfortunately, people generally resist change and it is a natural reaction so don't let that impede progress. As described in my previous post through taking on some serious business problems where having better information to make a better decision is a strong possibility you can by providing an insight based on the evidence that can correct those problems or at least improve situations. Using that very same approach at all levels as you conduct workshops with the business folk as well as your technology stakeholders. You must demonstrate the value of doing things differently thus introducing change with a positive portrayal. This will give you the best chance at introducing changes over time and can provide much needed business investment in order to implement processes and technology tools for managing Data going forward.
Only through demonstrated value will you be able to get enough buy in across the entire enterprise to make lasting changes. This can be achieved by taking manual error prone processes that have been used in the past to make decisions, and don't forget the 'hindsight' method mentioned in my previous post. Everyone gets that and can relate so keep what you are doing as relatable as possible for your target audiences. Business changes that have the support of leadership and an engaged workforce are far less likely to fail. So, you have won over the business and IT see the value in less manual effort and more automation as you improve the Data management practices the time to introduce Data governance is at hand. In some businesses governance is a dirty word so use it wisely and pick your audience. The ideas around governance and standard practices may meet serious resistance for reasons mentioned above. The way I would advise you tackle that is to simply state you are introducing some guiderails to ensure what you have provided in Data Classification, Data Management and Data Sharing can be maintained. And in order to maintain theses everyone needs to agree on some common language and processes.
To recap, you have;
1. kicked off the Data discovery work,
2. you have held multiple workshops,
3. identified and classified Data,
4. you have demonstrated how good Data can be used from various sources (combined in a Data Lake) to make more informed decisions,
5. and you have begun the discussion around guiderails.
This stage alone can trigger many flow on effects for one the organisation structure itself could come into question so be careful around your senior sponsors as they may feel blind sided if you don't have the operating model conversation with them. A change to operating model needs to be discussed as improvements as found and potential areas for further improvements identified. You will have many interested parties at this stage so be sure to spend time with all of the key stakeholders and ensure everyone is comfortable with progress and stays on the same page.
The work you have begun will pay off as more and more of the business gets involved so be open to any and all discussions around Data. The topic is very dry so try to give real world examples of where getting Data under control lead to major successes for similar businesses. Hopefully you have a Data Lake and some useful tools such as Microsoft PowerBI which is great for dashboarding and reporting out of the newly established Data Lake which doesn't have to cost a lot if you have some available storage or even cloud storage like AWS S3 buckets or Azure Blobs. Gathering the business into a central repository is a great way to start so when a successful problem is tested and resolved you can always build on that success. I will talk more about the technology elements in coming posts. Let's focus on people, process and winning the minds and hearts of your stakeholders.
The next stage will lead into more challenges but as long as you are applying a pragmatic approach that clearly demonstrates positive value and the creation of an agreed set of standards for people, process and technology you are on track. If you get resistance on any of these fronts you will need to deal with them immediately otherwise your hard work may get derailed. I take the view that everyone wants what is best for the business in the end so be open and honest and treat all with respect you will gain their respect and trust. The road travelled with trusted colleagues is a road worth travelling.
Be sure to read my next post around how to implement Data governance in a practical way so not to derail your efforts in getting the business to transform.
