In part one of this discussion of ‘Data Diabetes’ I introduced how an organization’s use of data is similar to our body’s use of sugar. Data is the source of all useful outputs of our organizations, and our success depends upon how efficiently and effectively our organizations can convert data into outcomes.

Our organizations use data to Discover (R&D, sales, etc.), Defend (Finance, HR, Compliance, Legal), and Decide (operations and management). Discover seeks revenue through innovation, Defend seeks to protect the business from risk and loss, and Decide works to balance reward and risk to keep the business profitable. (There is a fourth “D” for how we use data, Deflect, but I will address that in another article later.)

One of the core challenges for CDOs is the fact that these three processes all operate at different rates (their data metabolism), with different needs and different outcomes. This is true even when they are all consuming the same data.

Discover requires data breadth: the more, the better. Insights and innovation are derived from the mixing of different data types in new and novel ways. 

Defend requires data depth. Most risk, governance, or control processes demand certainty and traceability of data. This leads to a more-is-better mentality in Defend, as the bigger your haystack the more likely it is to contain the desired needle.

Finally, Decide requires timely data. At the moment that a decision is to be made, there are a small number of critical inputs that will drive the quality of the decision. Any other data delivered at that moment does not improve the decision being made and often is nothing but a distraction.

It is not a coincidence that these three data metabolic processes precisely map to the old Variety, Volume, and Velocity components of Big Data, as defined by a friend and Gartner analyst Doug Laney over twenty years ago. Like a doctor warning a patient of their pre-diabetes, Laney predicted the precise ailment with which many of today’s organizations continue to struggle.

It is not that these organizations did not attempt to address the world of Big Data. Rather, it is that their decision-making, their ‘data pancreas,’ was simply overwhelmed by the perfect storm of social media, mobility, and the context economy. Business processes from 1999 are simply incapable of meeting the demands of life in 2021.

The Yin and Yang in organizations

Arguably, most modern organizations are excellent at Defend, because they have to be. Defend must address all of the regulation, legislation, capitalization, accounting, and legal requirements that are placed on organizations. If you are not good at this, you are not going to be in business for very long.

Companies take risk very seriously. Defend is frequently the primary sponsor of CDOs in organizations, catalyzed by some new, challenging, and different legal or regulatory requirements. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are examples of legislation that launched a thousand careers for CDOs.

Similarly, most organizations are pretty good at Discover, because this is how you win and keep customers. If your products or services are not valuable, then again, you won’t be in business for very long. Once again, the need to improve the results of Discover has led to the hiring of many new CDOs, as organizations struggle to better leverage customer or market data to drive innovation. Customers demand ever-better results that are ever-more-customized to their needs, leading to great demands in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics.

If you are a Chief Data Officer, it is highly likely that the goal set for you is further optimization of Discover or Defend. The management wants to be better at either generating new revenue or  managing risks or outside pressures, and this typically is what leads to the establishment of a CDO role. However, I would argue that this is further evidence of what I call Data Diabetes because as stated above, most organizations are already good at Discover and Defend.

As the pandemic showed us, and what I believe CDOs must take to heart, is that most organizations are bad at Decide, rather than Discover or Defend. Executives may be loath to admit this, but the lessons learned since March 2020 are hard to refute. The need for quick, assertive, effective decision-making continues to accelerate at the same time as much of our data is trapped in data repositories designed to feed the far slower metabolic rates of Discover and Defend.

Hence, executives’ growing thirst for data cannot be sated, at least not until they realize that they are data diabetic. As a result, many data and analytic investments are actually undermining businesses’ capacity for timely, effective, and 2020’s-relevant decision-making, and no amount of data will correct this problem. At the worst, more data will make the problem substantially worse.

Wither, Willy?

I have spoken of Data Diabetes with dozens of CDOs over the last six months and all shared the view that while most were tasked with dealing with Discover or Defend issues, Decide was the real source of their organization’s angst. In this light, the last thing that their organizations really needed was deeper data lakes, larger data warehouses, or “analytics for all.”

Providing their organizations with these capabilities would be like Willy Wonka holding a factory tour solely for diabetic children. For even while they ate their fill of candy (data), they’d be making themselves sicker in light of their real underlying hunger for effective, timely, and reliable decision-making.

No doubt this will be a very hard message for CDOs to deliver to their colleagues, and even harder for many of those colleagues to accept. Fortunately, the message can be supported, not unironically, through data and analysis. As it turns out, the degree to which an organization is Data Diabetic can be measured and hence diagnosed and treated.

Should your organization prove to be data diabetic, you can use the data and tools readily at your disposal to prove to your colleagues that they both have a problem with their Decide processes and that these problems can be effectively treated.

In this sense, you as CDO can change your role from being a facilitator of your organization’s ailments to being the mitigator of them. You can shift your role from being Augustus’ or Veruca’s Wonka to being a beneficent digital endocrinologist, assisting your organization in the diagnosis and treatment of its Data Diabetes. With your guidance, you can help data once again become an asset, rather than a slow toxin that threatens the health of all.

About the Author

Christopher Surdak is an award-winning, internationally recognized transformation expert. He leverages leading-edge technologies to drive results-oriented digital transformation for organizations of all sizes, industries, and regions. Most recently, he served as the Acting Chief Technology Officer with The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

Surdak is the author of the books “The Care and Feeding of BOTS," “Jerk: The Digital Transformation Cookbook,” and “Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Driving New Business Opportunities.”

Surdak holds a Juris Doctor from Taft University, an Executive Masters In Technology Management and a Moore Fellowship from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s Certificate in Information Security from Villanova University, and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.