Building Your Organization's Data Competency? Organization Could Be The Hardest Part

Why? For many companies, who owns the data team becomes a new form of turf war. This post concerns larger Enterprises.

In the beginning, I see organizations put their data team in Finance. After all, if you don't have the data to close the books or give revenue guidance properly, what else really matters? Not only does it make the data warehouse virtually unusable to the rest of the company, it also often means the warehouse itself is missing critical business concepts ... like, um.. the consumer.

Usually the next stop is Sales, because this is the organization most attached to revenue. Particularly in a wholesale/retail organization, your have a few big customers and so the modeling and needs are more straightforward. Naturally, no CEO wants sales reps without the data they need to talk to their retail customers about planning, assortment, etc.

What's the right place? Ultimately some kind of Chief Digital Officer. A tech-enabled, REVENUE and PROFIT-committed leader who is focused on accelerating the business, which includes enabling other teams focused on serving customers better.

A few questions to think about:

- How many "translators" and analysts in your organization understand just enough about your business but also quite a bit about technology in order to understand how to model, refine, and build datasets to answer key business questions?

- Do you have a dashboard for data quality and understand where your gaps are?

- Which leader in your organization is committed to developing tools and processes to constantly improving data quality?

- How easily can you ingest and process new data sources that the business needs to understand?

- Do you have a Product Management team who is building tools for your organization's data competency? Do you even have an independent Product team at all?

- Is there any person or group responsible for upskilling existing employees? Or is everyone just on their own?

I was on a call yesterday talking about data and one of the favorite quotes I heard: "While we are talking about data, we could spend this entire discussion on org."

Truer words were never spoken. While it's about the data, it's mostly about the PEOPLE who are helping acquire, cleanse, organization, distribute, and understand the data.