I work at a place where data quality is not on anyone’s radar. We have a reporting team in our group so we do our best where we can, but combining any datasets with other groups (like marketing & sales) is next to impossible as each team is silo’d and do things their own way - think free-form text fields to tag content…
How can I politely and succinctly say the above? Also, anyone else in a similar boat?
Good luck. The company I work at has the exact same problem. Since each system tends to be owned by a different org, and the systems all meet the owning org’s needs, you’re going to be in for struggle.
We’re unable to leverage some of the latest advances in AI due to our Leadership’s abundance of caution and strategically allowable risk profile.
We need shared definitions to tell meaningful stories with our data. And then use a company specific example like how a customer’s journey can not be understood with differing definition between marketing and sales. The marketing team can’t measure the quality of the leads they’re producing unless they can directly link a customer’s whole journey from acquisition to churn. Otherwise it’s just vanity metrics. But don’t be too harsh, vanity metrics are really common in business. A company needs strong data leadership to create a culture of using data to justify decisions to a culture of using data to inform decisions.
Definitely try to use examples to help them get a glimpse into the issue. I like to explain documentation errors by pointing out when what are supposed to be sequentially recorded timestamps are recorded out of order in my work’s database. Sometimes the data quality isn’t there.
Implementation of AI requires strong unified data governance and data hygiene to produce company wide strategic solutions. The current company posture instead is focused on tactical level data collection and analysis which does not lend itself to consumption in relevant possible cross-department opportunities.
And if you want to tank it without overtly tanking it.
“We will need to establish a review and governance board to establish standard data structures and reporting that can be used to drive the initiative.
It will need to be cross team and cross specialty so we should start by establishing a group to identify those people so we can proceed”
A year later and you’ll be lucky if they’ve even picked out who can be part of the review process let alone agree on some convention and adjusting their tooling and processes to make that work.
Removing the unecessary adjective “old” would be an obvious start.
But what is your audience and what do you hope to accomplish? Unless you really have an audience who is likely to accept that the people in leadership are lacking an important competence and the power to go around them to get something done, then I would assume that leadership is your audience. In which case the part that blames them is entirely unhelpful and you should stick to explaining the problem and needed changes.
