I’ve been asked to give a talk at an upcoming conference about establishing a data culture in organizations. This space is where I’m working on the outline for that talk. This is a work in progress and not (at present) at finished thing

Caveat emptor: this is a working post. Content will change, grammar will be terrible.

Developing a Data Culture

Defining ‘data culture’

For purposes of this presentation, I’ll define a data culture as An organization where the majority of subgroups within the organization exhibit at least basic data fluency and where group norms call for leveraging data in reporting and decision making.

necessary components

Data fluency
Cultural norms around using data
Trust in organizational data

Developing a data culture

Changing culture is hard: culture is self-reinforcing; all the processes and organizational structures are shaped by the culture and they, in turn, reinforce the culture.

suggestions

Make data visible in dashboards, reports, etc
Make data decision making process visibile. Have managers and leaders talk through with their teams what data they collect, how they interpret it, and the decisions they’re making based on it.
Plan for resistance
Show how data culture is making employees’ lives better
start small - just like establishing agile in an organization; make your cultureOps process a data driven one

suggestion > Support the change (and exhibit data orientation) through a formal change managment process like ProSci’s ADKAR model

Awareness

pleenty of research shows benefits of DDD

Desire

Show how it will improve employees’ careers. {x}Ops are hot topics, and all them boil down to measure-act-iterate processes which are inherently data centric
watch for employess to be concerned that AI will take their jobs as an outcomes of this

Knowledge

data fluency assessments and trainings

Ability

make sure teams have access to the data they’ll need

Reinforcement

Top down or bottom up

most articles talk about data needing to be driven from the top

this is true…ish.
- You’ll need top level support to get systems to collect data and put access in place for people to be able to get at it
- Leaders can also spur the change by mandating data in QBRs, etc
…and…
- junior to mid-level managment can also begin using data and push changes up to leadership by demonstrating it in practice

References and resources

https://hbr.org/2020/02/10-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-culture
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/data-and-intuition-good-decisions-need-both/
https://hbr.org/2017/06/the-best-approach-to-decision-making-combines-data-and-managers-expertise
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-role-of-expertise-and-judgment-in-a-data-driven-world
https://hbr.org/2016/02/the-rise-of-data-driven-decision-making-is-real-but-uneven

For many types of decisions, especially those for which little quantitative data exist, the broader knowledge and experience of leaders still outperforms purely data-driven approaches.

the costs of moving to the DDD frontier are not trivial, and may outweigh the benefits – particularly if the scale of operations is just too small.