Quality and Innovation

Over the weekend, Ethan Aaron (CEO of Portable) posted a probing question on LinkedIn: Why do you need a Data Team? I’ve been building software and data teams for over 20 years, I help organizations design and build them now, and I’m here to tell you: you don’t need what everyone else has been doing. Nearly all data and analytics teams are overworked, underproductive, and yield questionable return on investment… despite everyone’s highest hopes.

There is an alternative you should consider. It will be cheaper in the long run, more empowering for your business leaders (and your technical teams!), and will reduce or eliminate the cognitive costs of employee turnover. But, like growing carrots, you’ll have to give it the time it needs to take root and grow – and all too often, executives get itchy too soon and want to pull up the carrots before they’re ready.

Two things are needed for a Data Team to function productively:

1. Proper Skills – Because the Data Team’s job is to keep the business honest with itself, they need to be data detectives and technical investigators… masters of finding context, questioning themselves and others, and finding meaning. (Tableau and PowerBI skills are great, but they’re easy to teach and .)
2. Appropriate Power – A Data Team is the ultimate arbiter of truth, helping people and functional areas achieve shared understanding over time. But all too often they’re treated like technical order takers, repairing data issues or getting the business their next dashboard or report, but never empowered to work with the business to remove the root causes of the issues that hold everyone back.

In the 30+ organizations I’ve worked in, worked with, and advised, ONLY 2 GOT THESE RIGHT.

In the majority of organizations, rather than being treated as valued collaborators, the Data Team is relegated to disempowering service work – susceptible to the whims of power plays, and becoming trapped in a neverending cycle of disappointment. The business will always be able to make a compelling case for why the things they’re asking for today are the most important – even when working on different things might get them what they want – FAR sooner.

That’s why you don’t need a Data Team.

What all organizations do need is a business integration team: a group of people whose job revolves around making sure people are literally on the same page – talking about business concepts the same way, measuring things that are meaningful, and using that information to move the vital few business levers that will help a leadership team achieve their goals with less harmful friction. The flow of power and authority isn’t one way, from the business to whoever is working on data and analytics: it’s a partnership where the business appreciates that these integrators can see what’s getting in the business’s way – and help the business to solve those problems directly.

(In decades past, you may have also seen these people called the Quality Team! It doesn’t matter WHAT you call it – but you do need an interdisciplinary team of detectives focused on helping your business units align with each other, and produce metrics that make sense. WE CAN HELP YOUR ORGANIZATION PLAN AND CONDUCT THIS TRANSFORMATION – reach out for a conversation. Or. find out more about power dynamics in and around data and analytics teams in my new book, Data, Strategy, Culture & Power.)