Where is Your Data When You Sleep at Night?
It’s interesting to me that we so often refer to data as oil to be refined to power the next generation of knowledge solutions and decisions we make, yet so many leaders do not know where their data is when they go to bed each night. We think of it as being in our machines and think about security and privacy, but too often don’t think enough about what we have and where it is. Our data simply can’t be secure, let alone private, if its presence and whereabouts are unknown or fuzzy at best.
We completed a study not too long about the needs of CAOs and CIOs. It was well and good to talk about analytics solutions and their needs for the future, yet we were reminded that some of the basics are still green-field opportunities, especially for our industry. Many companies in our industry know-how to manage data at scale. Many are trusted brands. So why not offer up services to help enterprises manage a very, very big problem: identifying, codifying, harnessing, and smartening their data? Companies are having basic problems with the basics: managing their data.
This really struck me one day when I was listening to David Sikora, CEO of ALTR. He got up in front of our audience and said point-blank something to the effect that we don’t let anyone in our companies tap into our bank accounts — there are processes and procedures and access rights. Why don’t we do the same with our data?
Of course. It’s so obvious. Procurement insists on protocols for buying pencils and paperclips, but our companies’ and our customers’ greatest asset — data — is all over heck and back. Our data needs to be treated with the same deference as the cash in our companies’ bank accounts.
I was working with the executive team of a multi-hundred-million-dollar organization not too long ago that was considering its data strategy. The team did one of the finest data audits I ever saw. They knew what it was, where it was, who had access, how it was generated, and whether it was licensed or internally generated. They knew what system it was in and what the rights were.
It was a huge first step and one of the finest I’d seen. I then shared David’s comment, and they stopped in their tracks. Of course, we need to manage our data like our money. They had one data asset, in particular, that they realized could be poison for the organization if it fell into the wrong hands internally. Yet they hadn’t thought about it like their own money. They are now on to the next step of fixing that problem.
I thank David for that rich visual image, one that is so apropos. Just like our financial wherewithal, the money needs to be used and spent, saved, managed and invested. We are deliberate about the allocation of resources and who has access to them. It’s time to put our data where our money is and help our customers do the same with theirs.