Your data reliability problem

This week is going to be a series of posts about your data reliability problem. Today we start of with the problem, and through the rest of the week I’ll explain how you can solve that problem.

Here’s the problem: your data products are unreliable.

That’s been a problem for as long as you can remember.

You see the impact it has on the team, who are constantly firefighting. They are stressed and demotivated.

You also see the impact it has on your delivery. The time spent firefighting is time not spent working on projects that deliver value to your organisation.

These issues often originate upstream of your team. But it’s your team that has to deal with them. To work around them.

And now your company has a new strategy to use this same data to drive revenue, probably through the use of AI.

This should be exciting!

But you’re not excited.

A revenue generating data application needs to reliable, but you know you can’t achieve that when the data itself is unreliable.

So, what should you do next?

Start with visibility.

Does everyone know how reliable your data currently is? Do you have that data?

Does everyone know why it’s not reliable? Do you have the data to show that?

Many data teams don’t have this data, so they struggle to show the problem of data reliability to the rest of the organisation.

And it this problem isn’t visible to the rest of the organisation, you have no chance in getting their help to solve this problem.

Tomorrow I’ll explain how to get that data, and how to make this problem visible.