workingwithdata_ebook_april21_awc2op 4

TREATING DATA AS A PRODUCT
And while ‘self-service’ data is often the dream, data professionals are tasked
with coaching the rest of the organization on how they can find, understand
and work with their data. While some in the business (e.g. developers and
engineers) may already be data-proficient, that’s not always the case for
other stakeholders.
‘Self-serve is a huge challenge. We want lots of departments to be
able to access data and work with it. But it’s really hard to teach
everyone to be competent with data and use data safely.’
‘Building consensus can be challenging when there are so many
stakeholders involved with different levels of knowledge.’
Without education around data practices, resources can go to waste and
teams can grow frustrated with their data product. As one customer found,
it’s a long term challenge when internal teams are ‘sold the dream’ by a
packaged solution, only for it to go wrong in the longer term. This could have
been avoided if the data team was involved earlier in the evaluation process.
‘I would see marketing go out and buy some tool, get sold on the
pretty pictures and then they’d have us make a bunch of changes
to implement it, only then not see use it in the long run. This
happened a few times.’
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