Date: 2024-07-17 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00005987
DATA MANAGEMENT
DATA AS AN ASSET
Leveraging Data as an Enterprise Asset ...Emergence of the Chief Data Officer
DATA AS AN ASSET
Leveraging Data as an Enterprise Asset ...Emergence of the Chief Data Officer
Original article: Open PDF ... leveraging_data_as_an_enterprise_asset_white_paper.pdf
More details can be found at www.datadrivenbiz.com/enterprise-data-leadership
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am very lucky. I was born in 1940 and am still reasonably active. It is very satisfying to be able to observe the amazing progress that has been made in many of the fields of technology including data processing during my lifetime.
I was very fortunate in that I got a superb education in the UK. I learned a lot in the academic setting, but perhaps the most important thing I learned was the idea that there was a lot more to learn. Many decades later I talk a lot about 'experiential learning' which had been an absolute essential given that knowledge has increased significanly since the end of my 'formal education! and the body of knowledge that people have to work with is huge and exeedlingly unwieldy.
This paper .... Leveraging Data as an Enterprise Asset, from 2014 ... got my attention several years ago. Obviously data are important, but quite early in my adult life I became concerned that there was too little of a linkage between the increase in the amount of data and the increase in the amount of knpwledge and understanding.
Quite early in my adult life, I started to use the minimum amout of data to gain the most amount of knowledge and understanding. While I was still at University and about 20 years old I started to broaden my knowledge base and understanding rather than having a singular focus on deepening my knowledge in a more a more specialised area of learning. I had the opporrunity to take Tripos exams at Cambridge in both engineering first, and then later in economics ... what in America might be described as a double major!
This set me up to start a corporate career. My starting point was a management training program with a heavy engineering company Davy United in Sheffield. The company manufactured heavy machinery used in the steel industry and at the time ... the early 1960s ... the company was engaged in major projects around the world building iron and steel plants and aluminium plants. Though the company was one of the more progressive companies in the UK at the time, I was shocked and horrified by how little of modern knowledge ... for the early 1960s ... that was actually being used in the company.
Specifically, I was flummoxed by the disconnect between what was going on in the engineering of the company and the business side of the company. Some of my fellow young university trained engineers were working on the design and deployment of advanced 'automatic gauge control' for steel and aluminium rolling mills that was a 'game changer' for the industry. Meanwhile the commercial people in the company were pricing the company's major multi-million pound contracts using a 'per ton' computation that completely ignored the new instrumentation that would have been better computed based on an entirely different basis.
At the time, the CEO of the company was a Cambridge trained engineer. He was responsible for starting the management training program that I was in, but he was presiding over a company that needed a lot more than simply better engineering design, the company needed a complete rethink of everything to do with management and decision making. I shared my thinking with the company CFO and got his advice relative to my own training and career ... and it is this interaction that led me to professional training as a Chartered Accountant. During my first vacation since joining the company, I spent the time in London visiting Chartered Accountancy firms and seeking out my next career step.
One of my interviews was aith a firm called Barton Mayhew, a prestigious accountancy firm in London. At the time, to qualify as a Chartered Accountant, training as an 'articled clerk' after a university degree took three years. This was quite new. Previously most accountants were trained without any university education, and articles were for 5 years. Many accounting firms required their articled clerks to pay their training, and in my case, Barton Mayhew offered me a clerkship without me paying a fee, and in addition they offered to actually pay me a very modest 'clothing allowance!'
I had meetings with about 10 accounting firms ... some very traditional and some more modern. I have some memory of my interview with Price Waterhouse which struck me as being very pompous but not very modern, and also my interview with Cooper Brothers & Co which seemed to be a century more modern than most of the other accounting firms. I was also intrigued by learning that Cooper Brothers ... CB&Co ... was expanding into the United States in collaboration with a US firm Lybrand, Ross Bros and Montgomery of Phildelphia.
In addition to the professional characteristics of CB&Co as I understood them at that time, they also embraced the idea that young articled clerks needed a 'living wage'. Many of the 'old-line' firms expected their young trainees to be from families that did not need incremental income during the training period of the younger members of the family! CB&Co had some articled clerks from this socio-economic class, but a growing proportion of the young staff were like me ... university educated and merely 'middle class' rather than 'upper class'. I joined CB&Co in 1962 and qualified as Chartered Accountant in 1965. Two other undergraduates from my college (Sidney Sussex) at Cambridge went through the same 'articles' at CB&Co during this time ... Chris Morcher and Peter Allen. The three of us all had interesting careers ... Chris Morcher in Australia and the Far East, myself in the United States and all sorts of places around the world and Peter Allen who became the Senior Partner of Coopers and Lybrand in the UK.
So ... getting back to data.
We have an amazing capacity to create or collect data, store data and analyze data ... which is good.
I am concerned that we have chosen to use data in ways that are by no means optimal for society, the environment and a desirable economy. It seems that more and more powerful people and organizations have gamed data ... weaponized data ... to suit all sorts of nefarious purposes.
Generally speaking ... we are using data in many ways that are anti-social and dangerous. That is very bad news.
The good news is that this need not be so. But in order to get to use data in a 'good way', there has to be a quite large number of changes to the way data is used. It can be done ... but it is not happening yet at any scale that will change the trajectory of progress in the manner needed.
Peter Burgess
Peter Aiken, President and Founder, Data Blueprint
The challenges of data, how to leverage it and make good organizational decisions about it, are increasingly on the minds of executives. We also have copious amounts of evidence that increasingly complex technical environments are placing growing demands on current technology leadership. If we ask them to do more with data then something else must slip. The solution is a new professional – someone focused full time on data and equipped to understand today's data challenges and forge the new ground required to help organizations successfully apply their craft in cooperation with the existing organization IT infrastructure. Yes, the Chief Data Officer must operate outside of the exiting IT constraints in order to be successful.
IT correctly runs according to a project mentality but data is not a project and attempting to run it as one has lead to many, many implementation challenges. In fact, in 25 years of working IT project failures, I've never found one that didn't emanate from a data source. The disconnect between the business and IT over data is so vast that everyone recognizes the challenge.
So now we have the three key ingredients for organizational data success:
- Establish a Chief Data Officer position that is dedicated solely to data asset
- leveraging
- Unconstrained by an IT project mindset and
- Reports directly to the business.
Peter Aiken will chair Enterprise Data Leadership Summit, taking place on March 19-20, 2014 in Chicago.
Enterprise Data Leadership Summit 2014 will bring together innovative and data driven companies which are now recognizing the importance of the emerging Chief Data Officer role in leveraging data as an enterprise asset.