Its not about your shiny tools, its about the value you deliver using them

And if you get this wrong you will probably be called to account for the cost not the value

I caught up with a data friend for a virtual coffee this week, they were lamenting the whole “single source of truth” they were experiencing with an org they were working with.

It was the same pattern Joe Reis talks about in this draft book chapter:

What Data Modeling Is and Is Not

A quote from that chapter:

<-o->

“I’d just been hired as a consultant for a mid-sized e-commerce company that was hemorrhaging money. Their CEO pulled me aside within the first hour: “Joe, our inventory system says we have 50,000 units in stock. Our warehouse says 12,000. Our website shows customers that they can buy things that don’t exist. We had to refund $400K last month alone.”

“I spent the next three days spelunking through their systems. What I found was a horror show. They had an ‘orders’ table with 500 columns. Customer data lived in six different databases, none of which agreed on what a “customer” was. The product catalog was a single enormous spreadsheet that someone manually uploaded to the database every Friday afternoon. Date fields were stored as strings. Some prices included tax, some didn’t, and nobody could tell you which was which.”

<-oo->

My data friend was telling me about the time and money the orgs CDO had spent implementing a “Modern Data Platform” and how they were now being asked to present what “outcomes” had been delivered for that expenditure.

Unfortunately when my data friend had to go and get a single number for the equivalent of Joes “Count of Stock”, they found multiple systems that had different counts.

And when asking various Subject Matter Experts (SME) which count could be trusted they all gave different answers.

But the SME’s were all aligned when they said the one count they didn’t trust was the count in the new data platform.

I joked that the CDO should probably google (or perplexity) the three envelope joke about now.

But realistically its not a joke. That is shareholders money that has been spent, its peoples jobs that will probably be impacted as a result of cost that seemed to have no value.

So lets say it again .....

Its not about the tools you use.

Its about the value you deliver using those tools.

End of rant and here is a suggestion.

If you are investing in new tools, or a new shiny data platform do three simple extra steps.

1. Define an Information Product using the Information Product Canvas
   
   You can learn about it for free here:

2. Take Nick Zervoudis course on how to easily and quickly identify the value of the information that the Information Product will deliver.
   
   You can find his course here: https://maven.com/nick-zervoudis/dpm-value-course
   

3. Have you data team build the identified Information Product at the same time they build your shiny new Data Platform.
   
   And then use the number from #2 above to start justifying the value the new data platform is delivering.