Getting your company bought into a data strategy — Bo Ruan
Listen to the full show here.
Bo on getting your company ‘bought in’ to a data strategy
Even if your leadership team doesn’t think about data you’ll probably find that the employees working in the organisation will demand it. This is because everyone in their personal is interacting with data all the time, whether they’re on facebook, twitter or they’re using Uber or Just Eat. We’re just constantly interacting with data and we can see how much of an advanced service it offers.
So, even if your an organisation that hasn’t traditionally used data, I think what you quickly find that your staff or the people you work with will quickly demand it. To an extent that has happened at the Alzheimer’s Society where, particularly people in operational roles or in management roles, finding they didn’t always have the data they needed to drive decisions they wanted.
Instead of having solid evidence to use to make decisions they were having to make decisions based on gut instinct. This approach can work to an extent, but I think now people what to have the confidence that data provides.
What you’ll find as well, is that even companies that have no data strategy will still be collecting vast quantities of data. We found this at the Alzheimer’s Society, so it was really easy to build our a data strategy. You’ll find this scenario is the case for most businesses so it is really easy to implement a data strategy.
Listen to the full show here.
Bo Run is the Head of Data at the Alzheimer’s Society.
After a year leading a data department at Greenpeace, Bo returned to Alzheimer’s Society and became their first Head of Data. This decision was influenced in part by the amazing work the Society does to combat dementia.
He was also drawn to the organisation as he relished the challenge of developing a data strategy in what is effectively a greenfield site. Alzheimer’s Society has yet to leverage the data it has access to up to Bo’s appointment so he was uniquely placed to roll out an effective and robust data strategy for the charity.
