Data is Not a Project: Large Retailers Need Less Composability and More Connectivity
In terms of emphasis, I see a lot of people focus on what solutions they need to compose together, and very little attention to their workflow.
Where data starts, how it combines and flows through the systems, and are these systems connected together? Usually the places where Excel lives, those are the breakdowns.
Stop me if you've heard this before: the systems you should be using for planning and analysis, have:
* The systems who have the right data are not connected
* Or the data appears, but it is too late
* The wrong level of aggregation of the data
* With questionable accuracy, and
* no way to remove exceptions or anomalies
The system integrators are helping you process transactions, but that is usually the bare minimum. The data you need to analyze and make decisions about the business are usually at another level of difficulty.
Meanwhile, your data analysts don't know the business well enough to deliver the right data to business owners. I find the most common problem here is simple:
Data is treated like a one-time project, and not a continuous improvement process. As a result, once the project is over, the business teams are left to fend for themselves. Data is like your child as they grow up, as you get more experienced you start asking more complex questions. If there is not a data team there to support you improving the number of data sources, their reliability and how they are used.
This generally means analysts embedded within the business teams there to help enable the improvement needed to get the business where it needs to go.
