Create business value
Leadership
Success creates opportunities. Leadership curates them. The better an organization becomes, the more possibilities appear. Customers reveal unmet needs. Technology opens new doors. A conversation sparks an unexpected insight. Before long, there is more worth doing than anyone can possibly do well. The best leaders possess two qualities that seem
Value
A committee sits for ten hours. Months of analysis have been distilled into a deck. Most of it survives perhaps ten minutes of discussion. Someone remarks that there is too much information. Someone proposes a dashboard. By the following quarter, analysts are explaining the dashboard and engineers are tending to
Strategy
We are instinctively drawn to clearer pictures. We polish spectacles, redraw maps and reconcile accounts to the last decimal place, comforted by the thought that a more faithful description of reality must lead to better decisions. Sometimes it does. A navigator benefits from a more accurate chart because he can
Leadership
The organisations with the strongest data cultures are often the ones talking least about data. Consider an elite athlete. Improvement rarely arrives in dramatic leaps. It begins with a tiny observation: a runner notices she is two seconds slower than yesterday; a swimmer feels slightly more resistance in the water;
Strategy
Large organisations often treat data quality as though it were synonymous with data value. Quality does not create value. It magnifies it. Consider contact records, company information, or organisational hierarchies. If a vendor can sell you a cleaner version next Tuesday, its value is bounded by the price of a
Value
Data quality has an unusual characteristic: success removes the evidence of the problem. At first, the issues are obvious. Reports disagree. Fields are empty. Three labels describe the same thing. The defects announce themselves. Then a good team goes to work. Definitions become consistent. Pipelines become reliable. Errors disappear. Complaints
Strategy
Every generation believes its defining technology changes the rules of business. Usually, it changes the tools. Today it's AI. Before that it was social media, mobile, the internet, and the personal computer. Each expanded what organizations could do. None changed what organizations ultimately depend on. Every business is
Technology
We often talk about data as if it ages like food. Fresh data is valuable. Old data is stale. But that analogy breaks down surprisingly quickly. Nobody looks at fifty-year-old census records and calls them stale. Economists routinely analyse data collected decades ago. In many cases, its value
Value
Most data strategies fail for the same reason cities go bankrupt: they try to govern everything. Somewhere, a well-meaning data owner is responsible for 4,000 attributes. Each has a definition, lineage and quality score. The effort is impressive. The economics are less clear. Finance offers a useful clue.