If Data Was A Football Team

Data is like football. The technology industry is obsessed with telling us that data is the new fuel, data is the new lifeblood of business and that every company must now consider itself a software-centric data company. If data is that fundamental, then we can perhaps suggest that data management is expressed in modern businesses in a way that reflects the team dynamics that play out on the football field. 

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about American NFL football or what the rest of the world and FIFA thinks of as football i.e. the sport known in the USA soccer, a term deriving from the name Association Football. The team constructs are basically the same in terms of attack, midfield, specialist kickers and defense.

Now that organizations in every vertical industry are tasked with managing a living ‘data value chain’ and its movement throughout the business – plus its connections to the sidelines for partner connections – the notion of a ball on the field being passed between various different players doesn’t seem too ridiculous. We need to keep the crowd (aka the customers) happy, so who plays in what position and where are the special moves likely to surface?

With data front and center in so many organizations, the act to form dedicated data teams has seen new roles being created, accountability shifted, silos broken down and new channels of collaboration established. But what does a good data team actually look like?

“Any successful (football, or data) team requires a balance between the right people and skills, experience and training – and then they need to work together. Data is no different, so to manage data as a product, you need teams, each bringing something specific,” suggests Jesse Anderson, Reno, Nevada-based managing director at the Big Data Institute speaking in partnership with Maarten Masschelein, CEO of Belgium-based data observability company Soda.io at the launch of Data Dream Teams, a new resource for organizations building their own data teams.

Data needs an backline operations function to coalesce, control and manage its existence. Anderson and Masschelein suggest that in football, this is the defense. 

“A dependable (defense-minded, but also forward opportunity aware) operations team needs to be familiar with data. This includes information like the expected amount or size of the data, type of data and correct data format. This helps the team to build from the back and plan resource allocation. A good operations team also requires a range of skills: hardware, software, operating systems, distributed systems, security, data structures, programming, disaster recovery and so on,” suggest Anderson and Masschelein.

The data defense function might be figuratively located at the back (they are called the backline and back-office after all), but they will always have an eye on what’s happening upfield in the attack zone, that way they can provide the ‘service’ (football and IT both use this term) for the next major surge forward, whenever that happens.

Data also needs a strong central hub and we could call it the networking team or the data engineering team. Much like a football midfield, this where a mixed balance of skills plays out as the team players work to nullify threats while simultaneously also creating attacks.

“Similarly, the centrally located data engineering team is about getting data into the right place and ensuring it is usable. A data engineering team creates data products and the architecture to build data products. Because writing and testing code is a big part of the data engineering team’s job, a software engineering background is recommended.