Chances are you agree strongly with them and even consider them as “Motherhood and apple pie” statements about data – that is, points of view about good things which are so obviously correct and believed in by all that they barely merit repeating.
Yet outside of data offices and especially in the upper levels of organisations, such as executive boards (the ExCo) and the C-suite, this is far from being the case. Worse, there are doubts about the importance of the role of data, including the need for a data office, which are driving down investment and even leading to the dismantling of this function and its senior leadership.
By contrast, no CEO, CFO, or CTO is calling for the removal of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on which most organisations rely to conduct their business. Now here is the rub: every one of those three statements above is actually about ERP, taken directly from the website of one its biggest vendors (SAP), and merely edited to insert “data” in place of “ERP”.
If the C-suite is convinced of the need for this spinal technology, why has data not achieved the same foundational status? During conversations with two senior data leaders in May – one working in a global manufacturing brand, the other in a nationally-important logistics operation – both noted that they are having to justify their personal roles each year and also emphasise the importance of data at an existential level as part of pitching the latest data strategy into the boardroom.
The outcome of these pitches is by no means certain, not least because ExCos are currently focused on how to position their AI strategy against the business strategy to accelerate its adoption. Against that level of noise, data can be reduced to just a background pulse, much like the drumbeat in a cover song. It has its place, but it is not the reason why you start to listen.
How then can CDOs and their ilk shift the position of data away from that of the session musician in a backing group and towards that of the lead singer? Lessons can be learned from how ERP established itself back in the 1990s when its current status was by no means certain, not least because of the level of cost and re-engineering required to adopt it (and the fact that core systems were programmed in German…)
Where ERP focused its marketing efforts was not on offering better quality processes or just an agreed standard for all users of the systems, but a whole suite of organisation benefits, including as expressed by SAP:
- Higher productivity
- Deeper insights
- Accelerated reporting
- Lower risk
- Simpler IT
- Improved agility
Every one of those could also be claimed for data, but are also part of AI’s proposition. A recent chat with another CDO working on the data transformation of an international bank made the point that senior data leaders need to be bigger and bolder in the vision they present. If they just stay in the lane of data governance and data quality, they will return to the back office, most likely as a side hustle of the IT function.
If German software can seize the political high ground and become embedded into the corporate DNA, then it is hard to see why data should not achieve the same thing.
Read David’s previous post about the genAI hype cycle.
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