Data – dr.Pep

Waking up

DeepDreamGenerator: “Journalist sitting at a desk at the newspaper office. The journalist grabs their own writings and trying to protect them, while fighting off a large crawler that wants to feed it to an AI.¨

Great to see journalists initiating change in their own organization.

Fri Aug 25: Guardian journalist Ariel B. reports that other news media have started blocking GPTbot. The subtly note in his article: “The Guardian’s robot.txt file does not disallow GPTBot.” (Version Sept 3, 2023)
Fri Sept 1: Guardian leadership has taken notice and blocks GPTbot – as reported here.

As I have noted earlier, data access is a major topic when it comes to achieving a healthy power balance in the information space here and here. Glad to see more and more companies take this seriously.

Personally, I currently see little incentives for companies, organization, or individuals to allow their data to be crawled by for profit.

When managing your enterprise data, you should aim for a flexible, loosely coupled architecture that can handle large-scale batch and streaming data as well as APIs

Piethein Strengholt – Data management at scale

Thorough expose that goes through a lot, over-indexing on the architecture side.

To bring a socio-techincal concept to life, you need a lot of technology

Zhamak Dehghani – Data mesh

In capable hands, data governance can actually be made into a sexy topic.

The Data’s Advocate

How to assure that insights change business decisions

The Board has decreed that you have to become a data-driven organization. To avoid obsolescence, things need to change. The old way of doing business is no longer viable. Only Data can make you smarter.

So, there you go. An Analytics department is set-up. A Big Data platform is is put in place. Data scientists are hired. Models are fitted. Insights flood the organization. And after a while all graphs start pointing to the top-right corner. Right?

Nope: Sales wants to sell, Operations wants to operate, and Marketing wants to do whatever it is that Marketing wants to do. No-one ever wants a proper analysis. Especially if the outcome is likely to challenge the status quo. There is a shop to run, a client to manage, and a problem to fix. If Analytics does not directly help to do just that, it is deemed useless. And everyone who does not get that, frankly, does not understand the business. That’s how, in many organizations, Data is side-tracked.

The first priority, is of course to assure that your insights are relevant and focus on improving key business decisions. But that is not enough. These insights should actually change the decisions your organization makes. And frankly, many business owners are unable to take an impartial perspective with respect to unexpected challenges – especially when under pressure.

What is needed, is someone who can ensure the fact-based perspective is taken into account in decision making.

Someone needs to defend data-driven insights without looking for compromises from the start. Someone needs to be in a position to challenge Category Management on their Sales v. Margin trade-offs. Someone needs to hold firm on the risk assessment in the face of an exciting Sales opportunity.

In short: you need a Data’s Advocate.

That is not to say that Data should always prevail over ‘Gut’ or ‘Experience’, or ‘Entrepreneurship’, or whatever you call it. But the trade-off should be an explicit one. Both to assure better decisions, and to build awareness on what it means to be a data driven organization.