Respect your data.
I am appealing to every data owner: Respect Your Data.
#DataCentric #DataDriven, #DataStrategy, #DataCulture – those are the modern buzzwords, and many companies claim themselves to be “data driven” or even “data centric”.
They often have petabytes of data dumped into huge data lakes/warehouses, and hope they did their best to join the “data centric club”. In reality, most of them are just data hoarders. The common mistake is to think that bringing data from around the world and somehow using it makes company data wise; In reality, it is a dead-end road.
Companies invest significant money into buying/building data lakes, data warehouses, and data centers trying to transform their business. Despite the efforts, this very often ends up with just another data swamp. As a result, management admits the failure, and their belief in data driven and data centric future dies.
So what makes a company genuinely data centric?
A mindset.
In order to become data centric, the company has to set up the right mindset that accepts the idea of data staying on top of everything; it is nothing else but the first-class citizen. Everything else serves the data.
Multiple companies live in coordinates of systems/applications, which makes these applications a minimal quantum of the ecosystem. This leads to the case where each application maintains its own data model.
As a result, companies have to accept the endless attempts to transform and adjust data models every time they onboard new software. Data becomes a byproduct; data models follow and mimic 3rd party systems rather than own business processes. It is so usual to hear “let’s adjust the business processes/requirements to fit with the software capabilities”. Are you serious?
Systems come and go. There is a plethora of once big names that are out of the market now.
Data stays forever.
Keep this in mind while designing an architecture. Make data the central piece of the ecosystem, and build everything else around the data. Applications are just a way to generate and bring data to you; it should accompany data, not vice versa.
Data is a central nerve system of the organization. Because of this, departments are not allowed to cage their data. Data should be available to the entire company so every team might use and extract value out of it. The common mistake is to think in a way “We generated this data, and no one else but us knows how to use this data and the value it has”.
Siloing data is one of the biggest crimes you can commit against your company. It just kills the data centric idea and pushes your company back to the dark ages. Instead, treat your data well, and let other business teams use it and confirm its value.
Respect your data. Do your best to make your data useful for the entire company.
Respect your data, share your data, and data will pay back.
Recent Comments