The Data HERO's Traits

Now a days each and every organisation involved in some kind of data projects. Latest technology advancements and new buzz words fuelling the enthusiasm to involve more. But only few projects succeeding with flying colours and becomes data Hero’s. When you look at in details and perform retro to understand the reasons for a failure (data zeros), it is definitely not technology or budget; it’s about people and culture. People and organisation culture is the key differentiators for data driven organisation, and then comes budget & technology.  Some of the successful data organisation (HELRO’s) traits are:

1.Transcend Politics: From start to end, number of road blocks (or call it as politics) interrupts the project; there is no single project without any roadblock. Culture that facilitates good discussions, Openness, and empowering people at various levels to make decisions, helps to transcend through the corporate politics and remove the road blocks.

2. Be friendly with Privacy and Security –Privacy and security is key for any data project. Security teams in organisation is very protective about their functions and approving new controls takes big effort and time. This is not just because they want to prove they are important, it is more of protecting the organisation. So key in this process is explaining the business case to the team and help them to understand the problem.

3.Human Communicators: One of the key challenge with tech geeks is explain the project/solution to senior management team. Most of the time, tech geek’s presentation and explanation is full of buzz words, programming verbs and modelling concepts. At senior and decision making people is not always (not necessary) tech savvy and find very hard to understand and approve the projects. So it is key for a team to put the things in simpler (less or no buzz words) and layman terms. “Genius of a person lies in seeing things simple and explain in simple terms not just solving the problem”. You can have very good solution, but if you fail to explain in simple terms no one will buy the solution.

4.Business Case Salesman: First and foremost requirement for a project to start is funding approval. And second is continuous financial support throughout the life of a project. As time moves, changes in business and technology warrants continuous justification of project benefits and it’s ROI. So it is very much comes down to defining the ROI and benefits upfront for a project and getting buy-in from stakeholders. Also just defining ROI at the beginning of the project is alone not enough, it has to be reviewed and proved at every stage of the project to continue its journey towards end.

5.User Experience: Project success and failure is mainly depends on its user’s experience. Solution should be focused on its customer and their personalisation. One solution will fit with one demography of users, but same solution can fail with another demography. So personalisation and experience is key. Team should know when and how to simplify and make output user friendly. Also organisation having a platform that facilitate configuration to tune the products on a timely manner to suit the market is important as well. 

6.Sharing is Caring: Data project success depends on people using the data and not just building the big data warehouses. Though efficient building is required, most of the benefits comes  if   data consumed and used by more and more people throughout the organisation. Data outputs should be distributed well throughout the business. 

Feel free to comment and share if you come across any other trait that make an organisation The Data HERO..