It is easy to assume, in a world of ubiquitous technology and exponential data growth, that everyone understands how the parts of the puzzle fit together to create the big picture of your company’s goals and success measures. Or that our whole workforce is easily aligned with the idea of centralising data, the quality and accuracy of which underpins our strategic decision making, as well as the customer experience.
The truth, of course, is always more nuanced. From the last wave of Boomers to emerging Gen Z, today’s workforce is a complicated web of exposure and experience, from employees born into a digital world, to those who have been learning as they go, often in an ad-hoc fashion that has left gaps in their overall framework. All this while technology is changing at an unprecedented rate.
The implication is that there is often-times a disconnect in the sense of ownership amongst the very people who are producing or using the data. When new systems or processes are implemented, employees can struggle with buy-in because the change in the ‘environment’ and externally imposed solution cuts their sense of connection to the data. It can feel as though data ‘just happens’ to them, rather than through them.
With so many exciting digital tools available for analysis and streamlining, it can be tempting to jump ahead in the optimisation process, forgetting that the people at the heart of the organisation still require a human approach. It’s essential, therefore, to address this at the start of any data transformation journey, nurturing a belief in the individual’s agency to influence the quality of the data the organisation gathers.
Let’s start with the employee-engaged activity of process mapping. While building our comprehensive semantic model, include team leaders in the conversation about where their data fits into the whole. Make the relationships between teams more explicit by tracking data’s journey through the organisation in ways that are visible to all.
The organisations we all admire are those who have a unified workforce, heading towards a common goal, but siloed working is endemic in every sector. By putting your people at the heart of the data journey, together we can achieve not just the technological changes you are looking for, but more importantly, you grow the understanding and participation of our staff. This is what drives cultural change. This is how you start to grow an engaged, outcome-focused data culture.
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