Five reasons why Data Culture is just as important as Data Science

Data can solve problems, but knowing which problems to solve is the real question

Erin is the VP of Sales at your organization. Sales are flat and Erin is growing increasingly anxious about getting back to growth. You decide to take a look at the customer sales data.

Is the miss coming from a certain product line? Is it a customer retention problem? Are new business efforts lower than expected? Perhaps deal sizes are shrinking? After some digging, you find that most of your sales are doing fine, but the annual revenue generated by 8 out of your top 10 customers has shrunk over the past 12 months. Erin is now armed with just the information she needs to address the problem and get the company moving in the right direction again.

But what if Sales are booming?

Erin is likely just trying to stay above water with all the new deals. She has plenty of problems, but they’re quite different. Now she’s worried about how the Operations team is going to handle the influx of new orders. She needs to make sure that legal has time to review all the contracts. She’s looking into hiring new sales staff to keep up with demand. If you come to Erin with a customer analysis and breakdown of where she’s missing, it probably won’t be received well. She’s got too many problems already and doesn’t have time to fix this problem too. Erin doesn’t need NEW problems, she needs to solve NOW problems.

The point is, you could do the same analysis in both situations, and receive a drastically different response from the leader. That’s because data is only useful when it is being used to solve problems that your stakeholders care about. When there’s misalignment between the business and the data teams, you miss huge opportunities to leverage data.

Business teams don’t understand data
Don’t turn your marketing team into Analysts… arm them with data to become even better at their jobs

Do you have that special person in your life that’s still slightly scared of their computer?

Like it’s going to eat them if they turn it on? This is exactly how my grandmother feels. We finally got her to log into her email account once a week, but it took 3 years of convincing.
My grandma is a brilliant lady. And yet she still spends an enormous amount of time with basic tasks like maintaining her calendar, managing daily tasks, basic communication. The computer is there to help her, yet she keeps doing things the way she knows. She’s COMFORTABLE with her old process. She knows it, and it hasn’t failed her so far.

I would argue that most business lines have a similar comfortability with their own industry knowledge. It’s what has gotten them to this point in their careers, and they’ll be damned if a data person comes in here and tells them something different. It’s not that they think data is bad, or doesn’t add value. In fact, if you asked them, I bet 9 out of 10 would say that they need their business line to be more analytical.

But saying you should do something, and actually doing it are very different things. What is stopping them from taking a data-informed approach? It’s fear of what they don’t know. Using data gives up control and safety of their industry expertise for something foreign, confusing, and different.
The lesson here is that getting your organization to use data isn’t about better algorithms, more hadoop clusters, or even more dashboards. It’s about the business becoming comfortable with using the data they have and blending it seamlessly with what they already know.