Digital transformation is a megatrend facing any organization in our digital era. Rapid technology changes draw data into cloud platforms, laptops, and redundant systems. Even small, co-located organizations struggle to change at digital speed. The scale and span of global enterprises make organizational change feel overwhelming. Viral adoption of new tech makes “data governance” feel futile.
Digital Enterprises Must Develop a Data Culture
You need data to do digital. That seems obvious. Digital platform transformations exist to replace siloed systems and processes that fragment data. IT teams struggle to keep up with integration, availability, and accessibility. Data consumers face complex, time-consuming, and manual data access, quality, and analysis.
How then can an organization drive its technology, rather than be driven by it? By becoming data-centric. Data strategy can close the digital strategy gap between business and technology roadmaps. Data management is the heart of digital solutions.
Reset Data Management To Transform & Innovate
Martec’s Law states that “Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.” Its creator Scott Brinker describes this conundrum as “the greatest management challenge of the 21st century.” It is nowhere more evident than in data management.
Digital transformation demands a bridge across this runaway gap between organizations and their technology. Transformative data management builds that bridge with both organizational and technical platform resets.
Directing and governing technology change requires organizational change. Digital transformation initiatives soon discover the need to reset data management roles, standards, and processes. This organizational reset builds governance and stewardship capabilities to reset technical data management practices.
A technical reset is more challenging than an organizational reset. Exponential technology change means that most IT strategic roadmaps are simply overcome by events. This creates a corresponding gap between IT organizational and technical change.
Conventional wisdom says that business/IT partnerships must balance operational demands with strategic investment. In practice, it is faster, cheaper, and more practical for a department or team to buy and use its own tech than to partner with IT.
Data spreads across cloud and on-premise locations. Datamarts proliferate to analyze these new systems with standalone reporting. Master data and reference architectures flatten and data quality degrades. Data has left the building. It is time for a data management reset.
Such strategic change needs digital leadership to drive data maturity. Digital leaders must heal the business/IT split, close the strategy gap, and effect a transformational reset of data management to resolve the challenges of Martec’s Law and enable digital innovation.
© 2019 Lynn Noel. All rights reserved.
Lynn Noel is Vice President of Digital Strategy at Data Blueprint, www.datablueprint.com.
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