A (Data-)Culture of (Data-)Trust

By Dominik Terme, Head of Data Intelligence

Always start with why

Why did we deal with the topic of a culture of trust and what do we understand by the expression “culture of trust”? This question needs a little introduction.

When we started to think about a central reporting tool at Marc O’Polo, which undoubtedly makes sense, because it is much easier to only have in place one technology stack, one single source of truth, one unique definition of a KPI, one user management, one visualization standard,… we also started to discuss our Data access policy and noticed that we had very different opinions on this topic internally.

The questions were:

• Who should have access to which reporting and to which data?
• What are the needs of our colleagues?
• What about possible leaks, if we grant access to every reporting for every colleague?
• …

One Step back — Why did we install our Data Intelligence Team in the first place

We started to discuss and soon recognized, that we should think about why we installed our Data Intelligence Team — the team creating the reports — in the first place. We installed this team to change Marc O’Polo into a company that acts customer centric, makes only data-driven decisions and understands cause-effect relationships. This is how it is stated in our vision:

Breaking the vision down to the team-members

We want to encourage autonomous decision-making by every single person, as we are convinced that the best decisions will not be made by managers, who mostly have less time to inform themselves about the decision that has to be made. We, as a company, trust our people.

The manager’s job, for us, is to ensure alignment and set a right and clear context.

At Marc O’Polo we already have a culture of “letting the best idea win“, not letting the idea of the manager win. At Marc O’Polo you should not seek to please your manager, you should only try to serve our business. We always want to empower our people.

The Marc O’Polo philosophy is determined by a liberal and open-minded attitude. We unite and promote individuality. These are essential components of our corporate culture.

Steps to establish the vision

When we were looking at our goal, we easily derived some actions:

To make this vision come true, we first had to focus on these actions:

• Mindset-Change (that data is helpful and that they can do better decisions with data)
• Data Access (that they need access to the reporting and the data)
• Enablement (of our colleagues to work with data, derive actions,…)

In this article we will focus on the Data Access part, as it is the first step towards our vision.

Data Access as starting point

In the light of the above, the decision can be made more easily.

Sure, every employee level should have access to every reporting necessary for her or his daily life.

But: Where are the limits?

• Should an employee in Online Shop Management only have access to reporting about the Online Business or also about other Sales Channels, like for example the retail?
• What about the access to Marketing reportings, meaning Brand KPIs like Brand Awareness,…?
• What about reportings about Logistics and Supply Chain?
• …

While discussing several use cases, like this one, we noticed, that it’s much harder to find a reporting that is not necessary for an employee in Online Shop Management, than to find a reporting, that would be helpful.

But, let’s stick to the examples:

• Should an employee in Online Shop Management only have access to reporting about the Online Business or also about other Sales Channels, like for example the retail? If the Online Shop Manager (OSM) sees an article, that the Buying department was convinced to buy big stocks of, but it does not perform very well now, although many users look at the article in the Online Shop, the OSM could look at the performance of the article in other channels. If the article is performing well in the retail business, it might be something wrong with the description or the image of the article and hence, there is a starting point for further investigation and actions.
• What about the access to Marketing reporting, meaning Brand KPIs like Brand Awareness,…? If the OSM is thinking about a special Onboarding Page for new registered members, for example, the OSM could take a look at Marketing reportings to see how the brand is perceived under new customer vs. top customers, what is important for our customers, why customers are buying Marc O’Polo clothes,… . There the OSM will find indications how to structure the Onboarding Page.
• What about reportings about Logistics and Supply Chain? When the OSM is planning the content of the shop for the next weeks, the planning also includes which products to display and promote. When we are talking about promoting an article, we are for example promoting top sellers or new articles. However, how can the OSM be sure, that the new article (in 4 weeks) will be surely in stock then? The OSM could look up in the Supply Chain Funnel to see where the article is in that moment and if it is possible that the article will arrive in time. If it is not, the OSM can already go for other articles to be promoted.

As you can see, there can always be a reason why someone needs access to a reporting, that was actually not made for her or his team in the beginning.

After these considerations, we concluded that every team member should be granted access to every reporting the team member requests. There will be no borders, which comes along with some dangers.

The dangers

We see three bigger dangers here.

Danger 1: Leaks

We allow ourselves a great deal of freedom in the pursuit of our goals and dispense with control mechanisms wherever possible. We are aware that this makes us vulnerable as an organization. We trust our employees in this respect and rely on them to return the trust. We think the pros of an open data access bring more advantages than disadvantages generated through e.g. leaks.

Note: We will not give anyone access to data about customers. GDPR and data privacy are very important in the EU and are of course very important for us at Marc O’Polo. The same applies also for other legal matters like e.g. cartel law.

Danger 2: Overloading the team with reportings

We are aware that an open data access can also lead to a total overload of our teams. It is easy to get sucked into the plethora of information. That is why it is important, to set-up a proper enablement process for all the teams and also to give the teams only access to those reportings tailored to them. If they feel comfortable with these reportings and the first questions about having a look over the edge of the plate arise, we are more than happy to onboard them to other reportings too.

Danger 3: Blind trust & possible misinterpretations

We are aware that an open data access can lead to possible misinterpretations. Data doesn’t lie, but it can mislead when it doesn’t show the complete story. We are also aware that data can elicit blind trust. During data analysis, it’s important to keep some healthy skepticism around numbers that seem too good to be true, or conversely catastrophic. We will integrate examples about data not showing the full story into our enablement process. We will also teach our colleagues to always cross check with their own domain expertise and gut feeling.

Data Access done right

After making the decision to go for an open data access, we had a lot of different actions to take, to make sure that every employee at Marc O’Polo has everything at hand to make proper data-driven decision.

I will not go too much into detail here, but actions included:

• Agree on one reporting tool
• One styleguide to make reportings easier readable
• Ensure a common understanding of KPIs
• Definition of unique KPIs
• Documentation of KPIs and easily readable and accessable documentations
• Clean-up of unused or broken reports
• Self-Service BI Trainings
• …

Data Access itself is easy, making sure the Data supports every employee is a great challenge.

Conclusion

We, at Marc O’Polo decided to go for a (Data-)Culture of (Data-)Trust.

We want to unleash the potential of our organization and want to establish our employees as independent decision makers. In our opinion, decisions should be made by subject experts. This will end up in better decisions and will prevent us from making errors or biased decisions.

This culture enhances communication and promotes confidence on ‘why’ a decision was made.

It will also promote transparency & understanding and will send a message to all stakeholders, customers & employees that Marc O’Polo is committed to a culture of trusting & informing employees and increasing data engagement.

We are aware that this makes us vulnerable as an organization. We trust our employees in this respect and rely on them to return the trust. We think the pros of an open data access bring more advantages than disadvantages generated through e.g. leaks.

We trust our people. We trust our data. We trust our people handling data.

You want to shape the digital future of the fashion industry? Start creating with us. The Digital Intelligence & Tech Teams at Marc O’Polo are always looking for talented and driven software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, ML Engineers or project managers to join our team. Learn about life at Marc O’Polo and visit our career site.