Data, Data, Data - Alignment adjustment?

Within corporations, data itself has many meanings and is rapidly changing including new terms, roles and strategic roadmaps geared to maximizing its value.

If you were to ask an application developer within your IT department about data, they may talk about relational databases or messaging queues.  If you were to ask a Customer Service Representative they would bring up personal data as well as maybe call center logs that track and measure the effectiveness of their work.

Senior Management recognizes data as a valuable corporate asset and this is creating several subcultures within organizations: Such as Data Governance Committees, Advanced Analytics Groups and highly specialized "behind the curtain" Data Engineering teams.

The real question we need to be asking is what is true value of data? How can we assess that value? 

Whether it is Big Data, Data Lakes, Data Meshes, Data Warehouses, Real Time or stored in the Cloud - we need to better understand the basic fundamentals of what is Data?  Whether it is unstructured, streaming, stored in the cloud across multiple Hadoop clusters.....If context and value are not being clearly assigned how valuable can it be?  How much is it costing your organization to simply store and maintain this data that in the end provides little to no return on investment?   The data approach we emphasize is collecting as much information as possible then assess its value.

Analytic teams need to understand the underlying data in order to build successful models that can be both predictive and historical accurate. If the data is unreliable and or redundant, false results will be provided and acted upon. Data Engineering teams need better understand how these models work in order the help store and organize the data for fast access as well as ensuring the data is accurate and reliable. Data Governance committees need to ensure what is being provided meets the overall business needs and helps drives the business strategy to be competitive within the marketplace.  If any of these three subgroups are not aligned then the value dramatically decreases over time.