The Data Underground: Your "A Team" for Data Refinement

This is part three of a four-part series meant to provide an implementable approach to transforming your firm’s business with data-informed decision making. In part three, we look into what kind of talent you may need on your team to establish a strong data-driven culture.

The truth about any team is that each member has differing yet complimentary roles, responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Your organization’s team for implementing a data-informed decision-making culture is no different.

If you find yourself in the role of launching data visualization, you’ll need to consider various real-world factors like a firm’s varying types of data consumers, the openness to using enterprise data, and the challenge of getting buy-in and cost approvals from IT for software subscriptions and security protocols. By my count, I’ve found 10 key roles are needed once you line up the talents and interests of people at an actual firm.

The secret to finding or recruiting your data team is recognizing that every single employee at your firm is already fulfilling the most common role: data editor. By filling in their time sheet, each employee creates a meaningful and valuable record of what they and their leaders consider important.

Everything that follows the daily-aggregated data entry is arguably an objectively logical data flow that allows leaders to ultimately get enhanced value out of foundational and verifiable truths about your firm’s priorities and performance.

Having that refined ‘truth’ then allows leaders to make bold, confident, impactful, and well-informed decisions based on the analysis of their own firm’s operational data. A functional data refinement program is akin to maintaining or improving your car’s performance through routine check-ups and diagnostics.

Here’s my real-world adaptation of the data roles needed to implement a data-informed decision-making culture.

Depending on your situation, multiple people can serve in one role, or just one person can serve in multiple roles.

Another key view of the roles is to understand who is accountable for justifying and building the team and system, and who is accountable for using the products (tools) of the team and system to bring value to the firm and its clients – allowing increased relevance, predictability, reliability, and performance.

However, be forewarned:

·       To attempt to justify and build the team and system capable of delivering decision-informing data without the data consumer demand to use the products is an absolute waste of talent and resources.

·       To attempt to get decision-informing value out of data without justifying and building a data team and system to deliver the products is an absolute delusional fantasy.

·       Both supply-side and demand-side forces are required simultaneously, even before the system is functioning and before the products are ready for use: people have to want the future, knowing it takes time and effort to get there.

Look at the top two rows. If you don’t already have every employee entering time and other business information into a database and someone doing even a cursory review of the data – especially timesheet data – your firm is an extreme anomaly.

Chances are that you do have those two things, which are the foundational organizational functions and skills needed to proceed to add on the additional team members and skills that allow professional data refinement for the benefit of your organization.

It’s also important to recognize that one person probably plays multiple roles: your Data Whisperer is definitely a Timesheet User and is likely a Treasure Hunter.

When all else is considered, to have a data refinement team, and to move your firm toward a data culture; you’ll need one thing first, last, and always: a belief that there is not just business value to it, but a recognition that refined data is as critical as oxygen in our data-driven economic reality.

The hardest part of all is this common catch 22 situation:

·       An organization can and will commit to such an undertaking only once they believe there is a value and need for a data refinement team and system.

·       An organization will only believe after they have verifiable evidence of the value of and need for a data team refinement and system.

·       The organization will only have verifiable evidence after the data refinement team and system is in place, validating its existence before it exists.

The crux is convincing organization decision makers that advanced refinement of the firms’ own data is likely the most valuable asset a firm can own as we step into the second quarter of the 21^st century.

It’s just like the title words of Courtney Kearney and Chaz Ross-Munro’s seminal book: “CRM or DIE.”

If you’re interested in learning more about data visualization and its link to A/E/C business culture, consider visiting The Data Underground SMPS Roundtable.

Also, watch for the fourth article, all about going through the long, hard expedition of taking your visualization product from idea to an in-use and in-demand source of decision-driving information for your operational leaders. Learn about the eight daunting challenges you will encounter: not wanted, not needed, not affordable, not enough time, not urgent, no trust, no commitment, and no follow-through. If you make it, only then will the idea become a reality.

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After an early career in US Army Intelligence and a time teaching English composition and rhetoric, Josh Grenzsund has been part of A/E/C marketing and business development since 2007. He co-facilitates The Data Underground roundtable for SMPS Seattle; a space for Puget Sound marketing professionals to meet at the intersection of career development and data-driven business.