“Building business logic is a low priority, from my perspective.”
This was what my CEO said to me as I shared with him my priorities for the week. The funny part? I work for a data engineering firm and operationalising the development of business logic is literally our core business. This is a perfect illustration of why it is so difficult to build effective data operations; it’s simply never the most urgent or important thing that needs to get done in a day, even for a firm that prides itself on operationalising data management.
According to a 2019 PWC survey of more than 1300 CEOs across 90 countries, there is a massive gap between the critical information needed to make business decisions and the comprehensive quality of the information available. What’s more – this gap is just as wide as it was 10 years ago!
Why is that??
Well, if my experience illustrates anything, it’s that prioritising data operations is just plain hard. It’s a discipline just like any other – eating your vegetables, flossing your teeth, and completing your exercises. It’s the daily discipline that sets world-class athletes apart from the average population and the same is true for organisations with world-class data.
So, what I told my CEO was that I agreed with him – building business logic for marketing data IS a low priority relative to everything else that the function is balancing. But I also acknowledged that it will always be a low priority, and that I considered it critically important that we begin building the habit, even if just a little bit at a time. Over time, this daily habit will build on itself – freeing up capacity currently constrained by manual reporting and providing myself (and my CEO) with the critical information required to Make Better Decisions Each Day.