Is data really important?

I have proposed for this 2022, go back a few steps, and start sharing concepts from the base, always within the world of data. This newsletter will try to promote the culture of data, presenting basic concepts, which we often take for granted or that we leave separated as boring, but that are usually behind the successes or failures of all these projects.

The Data Fever

It was already in 2017 when The Economist published an article, in which data had already become, in the resource with more value of organizations, replacing oil, and being the origin of the mythical phrase that Data are the oil of the XXI Century. From that moment on, everything related to data became especially relevant, since it had jumped from the technological world, to be present in practically any business conversation in which there was talk of transformation, profitability, changes in business processes or even the creation of new revenue streams. In short, the value that could be provided to the business through the data and the different types of analysis that can be carried out based on them. However, the magic does not exist and in order to take real advantage of the data, we must be clear that it is necessary to make some changes within our organization and the business processes that support it. From my point of view, the main changes, to be able to become what has been called a “Data-Driven” or “Data-Centric” organization are the following:

— Turn the data into the center of the operation. But isn’t it already? With difficulty. Operations are usually focused on processes and therefore enterprise architectures are focused on applications. However, these applications should be nothing more than the means, to be able to generate and process the data we need to be able to properly track our processes, and make decisions to improve or change them. And the starting point is that those applications stop working in silos, each with a data model that supports it, and that those data models support the business.

— Take care of the data. The quality of the data is directly proportional to the value we can obtain from it. It will not be possible to analyze the data and generate the information necessary for decision-making if the data is not of sufficient quality. For this, strict controls are necessary at the entrance, which guarantee that the data complies with the quality and validation rules necessary to answer the business questions that we need to ask them. In addition, it is also necessary to implement processes that periodically review that quality, and look for those discrepancies that may jeopardize the minimum quality thresholds required.

— Believe the data. Perceptions are often the worst enemy when we set out to change the culture of an organization and really focus it on data. Smoothing out that resistance is one of the most important challenges.

If we are able to internalize these changes in our organization, we will have laid the first stone to really be able to obtain economic benefit from the investments we make around our data. Without them, we can surely develop innovative projects, but with a much more limited impact than we could get.