How is data seen in your organisation?

In a response to my LinkedIn post on how every data transform is technical debt, Tim Hiebenthal commented:

I totally agree with your statements, but I have doubts about the feasibility of implementing it.

In most companies, software is a crucial part of operating your business, while data is just a supporting act. Hopefully, with data, it’s running better than without, but the company would be able to run without good data (and a lot of them do! 😂).

That’s why we usually see new features being shipped with little attention to downstream implications on the data pipelines and assets. In an ideal world, the data team would be kept in the loop before it or even data contracts would be established

This changes when data is used operationally, but as long as it’s “just” reporting and insights it’s usually “not important enough”

I agree that often data is seen as just a supporting act, and not that important (or at least, not important enough to do some of the things I often argue for).

But, I’d argue that even in organisations where that is the view, they are still spending a lot of money on data (people, tooling, etc), and when they open their report or ask for some analytics they expect it to be reliable and correct. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the confidence to use it to take any actions based on that data.

And if that is true, then it must be important 🙂

So, if you can make that argument, you can start having these kind of conversations about how to get them that data with greater reliability and less overall cost to the business by ensuring the software teams are incentivised to provide quality data as part of building new features.

And if it’s not true, they shouldn’t be (and actually, they’re probably not) using the data.

And they probably shouldn’t invest too much in data people or tooling.