focusing on how the data industry needs a data revolution, as part of truly making the data industry great, I would like to propose a series of changes to how the data industry operates, which should be incapsulated in a professional body and associated methodology.
This is where I believe the challenges start. Data professionals enter the corporate environment wanting to deliver according to their methodology. However, in many cases business is often not aligned with this and doesn’t understand the importance of adherence to the methodology. Neither strategically, nor in their day-to-day, business as usual world.
So often, business and data professionals wax lyrical on how they will become a data-driven organisation, but these initiatives mostly fail. Most commonly, due to an improper understanding of what this means, lack of business buy-in and support, lack of funding and a lack of vision for how to transform the business to enable this.
It should be clear by now, that besides the heavy focus on guidelines on how to transform the business, there will also need to be a heavy reliance on education of the business community. Not just what it is, but how we effectively do it. We need to teach the theory, but also the pitfalls, the consequences of doing it wrong. More than that, we must also show them the benefits of doing it right the first time.