Reducing Uncertainty in Business Through Data

How might you become aware of your need to hire your first data person?

• Is the growth of your company beginning to accelerate?

• Are there plans for an acquisition in the future?

• Do you have an increasing number of repetitious tasks that could be streamlined with automation of data?

How are you dealing with data at the moment?

• Does your month end closing take a week or more to complete?

• Do you have a single source of truth for metrics that matter to your company?

• Are the decisions and data handoff in your business processes collaborative?

• Are your application, CRM, and CS user ids able to be connected to get a big picture view of your customers?

• Are there data stewards for your systems such as your platform app, CRM, CS and accounting to monitor and fix data quality in the source systems?

• Do you have recurring revenue that could be segmented into categories for analysis?

• Do you have Excel spreadsheets that don't alllow collaboration and hide formulas in cells?

• What could your people be doing if their time was freed up from repetitive tasks?

Who should be involved?

• To hold interviews to discover business processes and the decisions and data handoffs that enable them?

• To document the key terms, processes, decision points, data handoffs, and metrics?

• To give authorization to pull data from source systems to a data warehouse?

• For working sessions to learn how to explore data?

• For mentoring on building and maintaining the data analysis solution?

Is there anything else?

• What do you wish you knew right now about your business?

• What difficulties in your business are you facing that are not mention above?

What should the data process look like?

• The process should be iterative, delivering on the most unknown or most impactful process at the time.

What should hiring look like?

• Hiring should be specific, hire for the skills you need in the near term focusing on personality and fit with the company.