CHRISTINE HASKELL, PHD

Numbers, the data side of the business

Digital transformation and data projects are not new. Yet, for every organization, they are a challenge. Most organizations–even large, sophisticated companies–engage with data on a highly ad hoc basis, with little management rigor. This presents two common problems.

• Stakeholders find it hard to know whether (and when) the data team will meet their requirements. This encourages them to build solutions that work for a while—until they don’t. Independent efforts that run too long without cross-organizational alignment often result disastrously.

• The individuals on the data team burn out because they often feel overwhelmed by endless requests (often lacking sufficient context) and have no method for prioritizing the many conflicting demands on their time (because everything is priority 0). Heroics of meeting every ad hoc request leads to burnout, and increased attrition further makes the problem worse.

mY CLients KNOW:

Every data project, no matter how small, is an opportunity to seed the movement toward a more data-forward organization by intentionally integrating data management strategy with the business strategy.