Putting the Value of Data in Context

My first take away from last week's UN World Data Forum was that data only has value within within a framework or context. That reminded me of what Craig Steward reported from last year's CAO Africa Summit, around the difficulty experienced when trying to get business buy-in to analytics initiatives.

I certainly know the cost of getting that wrong. I recall a cast-iron business case around the cost savings to be delivered by analysing warranty claims for a telco, and how if the type of claims could be predicted, inventory costs could be halved. The model had been proven, the finances checked. No brainer, right? Well, it was rejected. I only found out later why not. At that time, the telco in question was driven, and driven hard, by one thing and one thing only. New customers. Revenue, in other words. That's not to say no-one cared about costs, but, well, no-one cared enough about costs to buy-in to my business case. I got the context wrong.

I don't think there's a silver bullet to getting this right, but I do believe that the starting point for the discussion matters, and I have a sense that there are three fundamental starting points for any discussion with executives about the value of data. In business terms, they might be described as

whereas in tech talk, amongst all the other jargon, you might use phrases like

Decision-makers think about dashboards, reports, KPIs and other operational systems of record differently than they do about predictive behavioural analytics, for example. It's like the difference between knowing the final score of a sports match (hard to argue with, sometimes difficult to like) and reading the post-match analysis (which is usually hard not to argue with but also compelling). And within a strategy or a process, the end result is efficiency and effectiveness, not the specific value of the data.

Each conversation about data and analytics is of course different. Getting the context of the discussion right, however, is a key starting point for the buy-in which may not only unlock the purse strings to the funds required, but could also help lead to the ultimate reward of user engagement with the end results of our data and analytics prowess.