10 Comments

Now that I’ve read the whole post, you make a lot of great points - love the idea of setting up regular touch bases with the business and getting that feedback loop going. Also 1000% agree with all of this

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I've personally seen this play out many times in many organisations, but haven't come across anyone that has written it a succinctly as you have here. It's a great post. I'll be sharing this in my newsletter next week.

I also find find that non-data / tech professionals prefer physicals artifacts like demos of dashboards and websites over architecture diagrams and words on a page - even it's a wonky prototype - they ideally want outcomes and outputs, not progress updates (but they'd like that too).

I'm curious if there is any reading/course material you'd recommend to understand the business better? Read MBA books? Or just study the business domain documentation more? Both?

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Apr 3, 2023Liked by Joe Reis

For Data Teams I believe it should be a bioptic view. It must be a combination of business focus (external) and a focus on purity of the data (internal). I learned early on when creating a report for a Sales VP. He asked for specific set of numbers that were linked to the commissions of the sales team. I created the report and provided it to him which please him immensely - serving the business. Sometime later my boss, in IT, said that I had provided the incorrect set of numbers that inflated the commissions, like the business wanted, but were not the true set of numbers. She said that “As an IT department we must be careful to provide the correct numbers every time if possible. Otherwise people will begin to question the integrity of our output.” Just a reminder to me, and hopefully others, that we really need to be multi-focused - having a duality to our vision of what our task truly is.

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I have basically the same issue with how IT departments spearhead the goal of a “data driven” organization. It has to be up to the individual business units to understand what information they need in order to make the best decisions.

Maybe there is a need for more, better, faster data. Cool. Or maybe they realize the existing data is irrelevant for the question at hand, so they should absolutely *not* use that data. Maybe they need to do qualitative research. Or just read the newspaper.

So if IT wants to set an example, showcase how they themselves make decisions. When to use data. Why they decide it’s worth measuring some new thing. Or when they decide the best decision comes from keeping up with substacks. NPS fits right into that - together with a google scholar search on the usefulness of NPS.

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Apr 1, 2023Liked by Joe Reis

The business of business is business. The first step is for data professionals to empower themselves with business literacy/acumen.

SchoolofMBA has a mini-MBA designed using whiteboard animation. Here's a sample:

https://share.voomly.com/f/cvvB8_Z7o

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Interesting.

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“Here’s the deal. The business doesn’t care about data. The business cares about making money”

Depending on the business’s priorities (esp in tighter regulated industries like pharma), I’d add “minimizing risk” to “making money” --> and you can quantify risk as $$$

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I am speechless on your articulation. You are bang on the real issue. It may not be wrong to link this challenge across all IT solutions where solution provider is too much IT centric and tends ignore the real business problem.

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