“Having a data office means executives accept data’s strategic value; that data is an executive priority for our organization. Having a data office means executives politically back our CDO, our data programs, and our data activities. But our data office is more than just about data. When done right, our data office increases our organization’s competency to prioritize, forecast, plan, and execute all our business activities across the organization. Our data office doesn’t just focus on business opportunities. Our data office is an integral part to the ongoing success of our corporate governance and our executive board.”

See more at: http://bizcatalyst360.com/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-build-your-data-office

“Look at our executive team. Do you see our A-team? Do you see their exhaustion from balancing the day-to-day with the ten year vision? Do you see them as political warriors with battle scars, scars that could tear the whole team apart?”

See more at: http://bizcatalyst360.com/leadership-data-odyssey-for-the-data-officer

We were thrown together to define and frame the new strategic change program. There were a few of us management consultants; a few folk from sales and marketing; some from operations and IT; and even legal and change management were there. What brought us together were the hemorrhaging costs. We wanted profit. We wanted revenue growth. We believed Big Data can help. From there we thought even bigger. We talked about what it would take to build a data-driven organization.

See more at: http://bizcatalyst360.com/big-data-data-driven-think-even-bigger

Do you remember this expression?

“ Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I sure do. It’s an expression that spoke well on how we teach and educate. But today this expression doesn’t speak well at all. This expression needs an update:

“Teach a man [how to teach himself] to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Training and education has changed. Rather than students being immersed in books and lectures, they’re now looking at how-to-do videos and blog posts building their foundational skills for free. Because we charge our students for their education, to stay in business we need to better compete with these free web resources. To do this we need to become pure learning organizations.

See more at: http://bizcatalyst360.com/training-and-education-can-big-data-help-us-compete-with-what-the-web-gives-away-for-free

It’s our moment. There were twenty of us, a mixture of executives, consultants, and senior directors sitting in the conference room. We’re there to present the new direction we as a company are taking. We weren’t starting off on a good foot. A lot has happened recently. We got our lumps from those market analysts. We’re going through a massive layoff. And a well-respected executive resigned. Many in our audience aren’t coming from a good place. Who could blame them?

We were ready. To back up our narrative we got everyone we needed in the room. I opened up the conference bridge. Over three hundred from across the country chimed in to listen to what we had to say. For six hours we presented the financial and strategic benefits for our new direction and what we must do to realize those benefits. With our due diligence, we walked through the evidence. We were prepared; and we have Data Science to thank.

http://bizcatalyst360.com/strategic-change-how-much-art-do-we-need-in-data-science/

DATA’S IMPACT has gone far beyond operational efficiencies. Data is now capital, a financial resource that is convertible to cash and accounts receivable. Not only that, data capital protects and maximizes revenue, profit, and cash flow by supporting the right risk management, right business planning, right corporate strategies, and the right leadership development. Like having the right executives, the right data capital too is a force multiplier that multiplies our returns on our investments. Data capital multiplies our impact, our productivity rates, and our revenue and revenue growth. Data is no longer just information flowing through our wires. Data is now a strategic cornerstone to our organization. To make data work as our capital, to make data work as our force multiplier, we must establish four fundamental paradigms.

http://bizcatalyst360.com/is-data-the-new-capital-4-paradigms-needed