Data is a Lifestyle

I talk to a lot of customers in my role as IT CTO at Salesforce. Data always comes up in discussions with CIOs and CTOs. Actually, I can’t think of any recent conversation when data did not come up as a topic.

Here are some thoughts on data that I typically share/discuss with customers:

1. Data is Lifestyle — Data is NOT a project that has a beginning and end date. Data never ends. Sure you can frame up your efforts and activities as distinct projects but the focus on data never ends. Companies that accept the fact that data is an effort that requires investment every single year will move much more quickly than companies that require a continual re-justification of data efforts which will simply suffer from slowness.
2. IT Needs to Avoid Being a Bottleneck — IT needs an operating model regarding data that ACCELERATES the businesses ability to access and analyze data. This seems obvious but I often see customers that do not have a strategy related to “freeing the data” so that the business teams can move quickly. This IT strategy should include 1) an agreed upon data security decision making framework otherwise IT will continue to ask and re-ask the same questions over an over again for the same type of data which creates tremendous frustration with business teams 2) a “secure sandbox environment” in which business teams can analyze secure data sets with standard tools so that IT does not become a “reporting bottleneck.” No IT groups can keep up with all the different ways that business teams want to slice and dice data so IT must…