Why Data Leadership Is Crucial For Businesses To Combat Future Pandemics
Author Anthony J. Algmin discusses the importance of data leadership in the business world
Anthony J. Algmin is the founder of Algmin Data Leadership and author of Data Leadership: Stop Talking About Data and Start Making an Impact! I spoke to him regarding why data leadership is so important for businesses and the impact COVID-19 is having on the world right now.
Anthony, data leadership is a new term for me. For others that are in my shoes, how would you explain what data leadership is?
Absolutely. You have your business leadership side of the house and you have your technology development side of the house and we keep a very simple right. Technology people are building technology, so hopefully the business uses it and then great business happens. The business people are saying, we need to make great business happen. On the business side, we realize data is important, but we don’t know what exactly to do with it. And on the technology side, we love to build interesting stuff and hope the business can use it productively.
What I realized is we’re treating it without a proper calibration on either side. I saw so many organizations, doing a lot of data work, but what really matters is that your business increases revenue or decreases its cost or improves its risk management. Those are really the fundamental measures to the success of an organization. And that’s really what data value is, applying the data to the business process. And so that is really the notion of data leadership saying, “Hey you have this untapped resource, that you are literally squandering. And if you don’t apply it and make your business better with it, then your competitors will and you will lose.”
Having done data leadership for larger companies, what set you on the journey to start Algmin Data Leadership and work for yourself?
I think the best way to think about why I feel like I’m filling a need or blazing a trail with data leadership is that it hasn’t really been talked about. I’ve had the opportunity to be both a technology developer, where I’m building data systems and I’m sharing information with both, as well as being a business leader and having that background, understanding what your boards and executive teams need from the data that they have and what they’re trying to do with it.
Having both of those experiences throughout my career and realizing that neither side is really hearing the other side or understanding how to work with the other side, I said, “You know that’s not acceptable.” We have to do a better job of becoming a singular business that leverages data to be better at what we do in business and that needs to drive us more than the specific functions or specific technologies. We need to become better at working together, to achieve a shared outcome that we both depend on.
Having experience on both sides of the spectrum. Does this allow for a more structured or well-rounded approach to your work in data leadership?
It’s given me a perspective that not too many people have had the opportunity to see. And that’s where I feel like, talking about data leadership and trying to explain it where it resonates on both sides, that’s really my goal. To help draw those two different aspects of our businesses together and that’s what my life’s work is about. I feel very fortunate that I found it.
When we’re talking specifically about receiving data and processing it over from the business side to the technology side, what would we see in the data, that would benefit the business?
Let’s start with what kinds of things we would benefit from as a business. One of the examples I like to think about is, say you have a small restaurant and that restaurant, had different amounts of sales on a regular basis. That seems pretty typical, right? But maybe, you happen to have a restaurant that has an increase in sales when the weather is nice outside and then not so much when it’s raining outside. If you know that, or if you suspect that you can look at some data and compare it against your sales to say, “Okay tomorrow it’s supposed to be 20 degrees outside and freezing cold. Should we have extra on hand? Or should we have a little bit less?”
Something as simple as that, can really impact your bottom line. Why? You’ll have less wasted ingredients in your restaurant, you’ll be able to manage staff more effectively, you’ll be able to prepare your customers and the things you need to do front and back of house that have to be ready for the day. Maybe it’s not weather, it could be events like the current virus outbreak. Right now, we are seeing unprecedented change, so we don’t know what’s going to happen. But, if we have a suspicion of what might impact our business, we can put some data behind it, become more confident about what we’re going to do in the future and it’ll leave the better outcomes.
You made reference to COVID-19 (Corona virus) which we have been affected by across the globe. Have you seen anything with businesses you work with directly or indirectly where data has saved them in the time of need?
I think the first and most obvious thing right now is we’ve seen, even in the last few days, a massive shift to working remotely. One of my clients right now is a pretty high-tech organization with a huge supply chain and a lot of different things going on. And because they do already have a pretty distributed workforce and a lot of their employees work from home once a week, they are in a much better position than a lot of other businesses out there. I think we’re going to see the ones that have a good data driven supply chain and a good ability to be adaptive to differences in their business model quickly, make the biggest difference.
With the quick shift in our work lives, have you noticed an abundance of small businesses reaching out to you, wanting to implement a data system to sort of, catch up with the curve and ultimately get ahead of it?
It’s mostly in triage mode. Everybody’s looking internally, trying to figure out how do we get our footing right now and get past this immediate shock. I think the business world and the markets are absolutely in shock today. But I think once we start to see news slow down a little bit and people start to realize, this is what it might look like as we come out of this, you’re going to start to see more strategic actions being taken. We will ask the questions, how do we survive the next month, two-months, quarter-year in a way, that hopefully we can come out of this even stronger because there will be new business opportunities in a recovering world. Right now, we’re just trying to hold on until we flatten out.
Getting back to normal will be a major relief to everyone at this point!
Yes. Although! I have noticed a market downturn in the amount of nonsense telemarketing calls!
You were scheduled at the Enterprise Data World Conference in San Diego, until it was ultimately cancelled due to COVID-19. On March 19th you are scheduled for a webinar with Bob Seiner and Dataversity, what is Dataversity?
Enterprise Data World Conferences is my favorite event of the year and it’s heartbreaking that we had to cancel it, but it’s understandable given the circumstances. One thing we will do is, record the various sessions, then those will be made available to the people that were registered for the event. Dataversity, has really done an amazing amount of work with the kind of broader data management community and they have some fantastic online training resources and free web-based resources for people that are trying to learn more about data management.
You’ve written a book that is the first of its kind, Data Leadership: Stop Talking About Data and Start Making an Impact! What’s the implied take away from this book?
The goal for my book is to be the kind of book that somebody who would attend a Dataversity event would bring back and give to their leadership team on the management side back in the office. That’s really what it’s about. It’s really about helping the business side understand “Oh, this is why this is important. This is what we can do about it.” They’re the ones that need to hear that, they have been cut-off from that conversation. That’s really what data leadership is about and in particular the book was designed to be something that was readable and accessible and relatively easy to digest for those on the business side.
What’s next for Anthony Algmin?
I’m actually developing a video podcast so I’m going to be doing a lot of interviews with colleagues in data leadership. There are so many good stories out there that are a little in the face of whether there are still experts in the field. I want to be able to bring those stories to folks and I think with a limited list I can make that happen. So we do a video podcast on YouTube and then I’m going to do an audio podcast from those recordings to distribute as a regular podcast. That’ll hopefully be coming out in the next couple of months.
Click here for more info on Anthony’s Dataversity webinar appearance on March 19, 2019.
Do you utilize data leadership to sustain your business? Let us know down in the comments.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.
This article originally published on GREY Journal: https://discovergrey.com/hustle/work-tech/why-data-leadership-is-crucial-for-businesses-to-combat-future-pandemics/
