data & Analytics is delivering on its promise. Every day, it helps countless organizations do everything from measure their ESG impact to create new streams of revenue, and consequently, companies without strong data cultures or concrete plans to build one are feeling the pressure. Some are our clients—and more of them are asking our help with their data strategy.
Often their ask is a thinly veiled admission of overwhelm. They struggle to even articulate their objective, or don’t know where to start. The variables seem endless: data—security, science, storage, mining, management, definition, deletion, integration, accessibility, architecture, collection, governance, and the ever-elusive, data culture. But for all that technical complexity, their overwhelm is more often a symptom of mindset. They think that when carving out their first formal data strategy, they must have all the answers up front—that all the relevant people, processes, and technologies must be lined up neatly, like dominos.
We discourage that thinking. Mobilizing data is more like getting a flywheel spinning: it takes tremendous effort to get the wheel moving, but its momentum is largely self-sustaining; and thus, as you incrementally apply force, the wheel spins faster and faster, until fingertip touches are enough to sustain a blistering velocity. As the wheel builds to that speed, the people, processes, and technologies needed to support it make themselves apparent.
In this article, we offer four things you can do to get your flywheel spinning faster, and examine each through the story of Alina Parast, Chief Information Officer of ChampionX, and how she is helping transform the company (which delivers solutions to the upstream and midstream oil and gas industry) into a data-driven powerhouse.
When ChampionX went public, its cross-functional team (which included supply chain, digital/IT, and commercial experts) avoided or at least tempered any grandiose, buzzword-filled declarations about “transformations” and “data-driven cultures” in favor of real-world problem solving. But also, it didn’t choose just any problem: it chose the rightproblem—which is the first and most crucial step to getting your flywheel spinning.
At the time, one of ChampionX’s costliest activities in its Chemical Technologies business was monitoring and maintaining customer sites, many of which were in remote parts of the country. “It was more than just labor and fuel,” Alina explained. “We had to spend a lot on maintaining vehicles capable of navigating the routes to those sites, and on figuring out what, exactly, those routes were. There were, and still are, no Google maps for where our field technicians need to go.” Those costs were the price of “keeping customers’ tanks full, not dry”– one of ChampionX’s guiding principles and the core of its value proposition to improve the lives of its customers. “And so, we wondered, ‘how can we serve that end?’”
The problem the team chose to solve—lowering the cost of site trips—might appear mundane, but it had all the right ingredients to get the flywheel moving. First, the problem was urgent, as it was among ChampionX’s most significant expenses. Second, the problem was simple (even if its solution was not). It was easy to explain: It costs us a lot to trek to these sites. How can we lower that cost? Third, it was tangible. It concerned real world objects—trucks, wells, equipment, and other things people could see, hear, or feel. Equally important, the team could point to the specific financial line items their efforts would move. Finally, the problem was shared by the enterprise at large. As part of the cross-functional leadership team, Alina didn’t limit herself to solving what were ostensibly CIO-related problems. She understood: if it was a problem she and her organization could help solve, then it wasa CIO-related problem.
