Digital Transformation: Conjuring Data from Nothing
Date: September, 2017
“Who gave you this information?”
Joe, the employee
With a hint of fear and confusion in the tone of his voice, my colleague, Joe, came up to me and asked, “Who gave you this information?”. The information that Joe collects is difficult to obtain, relies heavily on the appropriate context, and needs to be updated daily. His value to the team is providing the current public policy and legislative risks for this fortune 100 company. In this situation, he was concerned that the information in this new system might have been inaccurate.
Joe accessed this information via our new Contact Relationship Management tool that recently went live. This system was a huge shift in the way information had been collected, updated, and accessed for this team. Until 2017, this team functioned in an ad-hoc fashion, utilizing the suite of Microsoft Office products, and storing information on their local hard drives or on paper. The need for a central repository was long overdue; however, the change in culture that was required could not be understated.
With the serious cadence in Joe’s voice, I wanted to provide a helpful response, especially since I was one of the newest members on the team. I was determined to show my value as a data analyst on a team filled with public policy experts who questioned the usefulness of the new quantitative group. Without much thinking, my instincts kicked in and I quickly gave a response to Joe.
“You did. You gave me this information.”
The Data Generalist
I could see the confusion was still all over his face. Fortunately for Joe, I had been on this implementation since day one. Because there were no consistent data standards across the team nor any existing databases, we had to create data fields from scratch to capture this information. We interviewed him, along with the rest of the subject matter experts, through an extensive list of questions in order to populate the CRM with the latest public policy risks. Because this process took several months, there was a high likelihood that much of the information was now out of date. Once Joe finally understood that the interviews were the sources of data, I could see an immediate change in his demeanor. His shoulders dropped a few inches and he finally started to relax.
Afterwards, I started to think about his point of view in this experience. The transfer of information from hard copies of paper and interviews into a computer might appear like magic to someone like Joe. It was not his responsibility to understand the technical nature of this digitization process. The responsibility was on our team to communicate the high-level process in a more effective manner.
When digitizing a system, it is imperative that your stakeholders understand the flow of data from the source all the way through to the end user.
~ The Data Generalist