Are you a data hostage?
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A few years ago I was starting a small BI team in a mid-sized organization. They hadn’t invested in BI up to that point and had experienced a lot of pain attempting to provide basic reporting capabilities to their clients. One day, a product manager called me and said “I need a report for my new product”. “Great”, I replied, “when does the product launch?” A brief silence was followed by a terse voice “Well, it launched 6 months ago; we need to measure how well it’s going.” I took a deep breath and said “what system are you using to collect the data?” only to hear “Well, I don’t know, isn’t that your problem?”
It certainly turned out to be my problem. It turned out that no one was actually collecting any of the data. And we officially became a hostage to the data, or in this case, lack thereof.
There are two primary ways you can be held hostage by your data. The first is that you don’t collect and store all the data in your data warehouse. I am not a proponent of storing data just for the sake of storing data. But, disk space is cheap, and business is dynamic. So if you are not sure you need the data bring it in. The worst place to be in is that place where you realize you need data that you have no or limited access to (as in the example above).
The second common way that organizations are hostage to their data is that they have no staff that has the capability to find the information buried in the data. You may have “analysts”; you may have lots of “analysts” on your team as a matter of fact. But a title does not an analyst make. Anyone can use sophisticated software to report descriptive statistics. Some of them may even look very important and impactful. But it takes a true analyst to find out what your data really means. Without these analysts you can invest millions in collecting, storing and reporting data and never find a bit of true value in it.
There are two easy steps to avoid becoming a hostage. Bring in data that you think will be helpful, even if you are not sure how you are going to use it yet. And, hire a team of analysts (the real kind) to gain valuable insight from that data.
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