What am I talking about? I'm talking about our inability to translate breakfast, lunch and dinner rants into interoperable technologies that provide decision-makers with the right data at the right time for the right price. Why is this so hard?
30 years ago, I was told that data was king. It's taken me three decades to fully understand the importance of that simple statement and the importance attached to someone's need for information presented in the right way at the right time. Today, we think about all this as business intelligence (BI), which has become an enormous industry in and of itself. But it’s more than that.
It’s the ability to answer questions about customers, growth, profitability, supply chains, inventories, pricing and a whole lot more – instantly. Can we do this today? If the billions that companies are paying for BI vendors is any indication, we can’t. BI today is a technology, not a business solution.
Just the other day it happened again. In a discussion about the development of a company’s technology strategy, it became very clear that what the business wanted from the strategy was one thing: data. Did they care all that much about infrastructure, about the wonderfully reliable messaging platform, about the near-zero-latent network, about the upgrade to Vista?
Hell no. All they cared about was the ability to get data into their hands when they need it to make decisions about only three things: how to make money, how to save money, how to improve service. If the “strategy” could help them do one or more of those things they would be very happy. The rest, from their perspective, is boilerplate.
In many respects this is the ultimate conclusion to the “IT doesn’t matter” argument launched in 2003 by Nick Carr. I have said for years that Nick was half right – that operational technology has definitely commoditized but that strategic technology could still be a huge differentiator – when acquired, deployed and supported correctly. The business doesn’t want to discuss how elegant, secure, reliable or scalable the infrastructure is; they are obsessed with what technology can do for their ability to save money, make money and improve service.
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Or, put another way, they are obsessed with their own performance and securing excellent employee reviews for themselves and their teams. Technology’s role is to make that happen, and in order to make that happen, we all need to focus – again – on data.
I used to draw cute distinctions between “data,” “information” and “knowledge,” you know, with information the extension of data and knowledge the end-result of collective information interpreted by knowledge managers. Sure, the distinction was cute and even accurate – but no one really cares about how I – or anyone – slice up definitions of the same thing.
I actually feel a little stupid (I’m the “stupid” in the “it’s the data, stupid”). I have been listening to the “data is king” and “friendly data” tunes for decades, but, unlike the Sade (“Your Love is King”) and James Taylor (“You’ve Got a Friend”) songs that I can remember like it was “yesterday” (another great song), I don’t seem to understand what the words really mean.
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