Best Practices
- Best Coffee in Florida?Fun fact: CIOs love rules. This “Binary Ten Commandments” series quickly became my most-read. Enjoy!
When I coached my daughter’s softball team years ago, I had the brilliant idea to recruit the fastest athlete at the school and put her in the game when a slow runner got on first base.
But in her first game, she ran directly from first base to third base, skipping second base altogether. She didn’t understand even the simplest rule of the game: you must touch all the bases before you can score.
Sometimes, you need to start with the basics.
Starting at the Beginning
A frictionless solution starts with good data and ends with good decisions. But many companies go straight to the metrics, just like that softball player thinking she could skip a few bases on her way to home plate.
That’s why I’ve put together this simple list of rules: to help you start in the right place and stay on track. I’ve written a series of articles explaining each one.
00001010 Commandments of Data Strategy
Never mask bad data with logic.
Don’t worry if some of these rules don’t make sense to you right now. Just start using them to help with everyday decisions.
For example, if IT replies to your request by creating a new report, you might want to discuss the Fourth Commandment with them. Or if you’re an IT person responding to a request to clean up some bad data with more report logic, you might want to discuss the First Commandment with the people who asked you to do it.
A Rule For Everything?
IT people (like me) love following rules. We constantly standardize things. We measure success by “The Five 9s,” meaning we expect the systems we support to stay up and running 99.999% of the time. The more closely we stick to the rules, the better our chances of achieving the Five 9s.
IT theorists even figured out how to standardizepeople. They view people as “personas,” meaning that they think of a typical user and create rules for how that user should do their work.
We try to control everything.
Using data for decisions is more like shaping clay into pottery than assembling furniture from a wordless set of IKEA instructions. Nobody starts their pottery project with the same lump of clay. Your data reflects everything unique about your company; people spin, stretch, and mold it into new shapes every day. There’s nothing boilerplate about it.
Shohei just had the best single-game performance of all time (see video below). He knows what to do in any situation, without even thinking about it. Even Ohtani started by learning the rules of baseball, but instead of constraining him, the rules set him free to show us the beauty of the game.
Just following these rules will never make you the Shohei Ohtani of data. The whole point is to help you begin to understand the purpose behind each rule. Rules alone can never deliver the strategic outcomes you’re looking for, but they can help you avoid obvious mistakes.
To remind you of this week’s data concept, enjoy I Fought The Law, by The Clash from the Frictionless Data Spotify playlist.