What does it take to be a data leader in business today? With Elizabeth Press, D3M Labs

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Elizabeth Press, the creator and owner of D3M Labs – “the Data-Driven Decision Making Blog”. Elizabeth is an experienced data leader, having held data and business intelligence leadership roles with a variety of different businesses in Europe, particularly Berlin, including more than five years with Dell and the same period running her own consultancy. Originally a journalist, it’s to these roots that she’s recently returned with the Data-Driven Decision Making blog.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In our discussion, Elizabeth paints a bleak picture of the state of data leadership and data usage within most businesses today.

In part this is the result of “data people” and the rest of the business failing to speak the same language and – as a consequence – failing to understand what each other does and how they can be useful to one-another. Businesses fail to treat data as an asset, and data people are often unable to demonstrate quite what an asset it can be. Elizabeth puts this down to a ‘human centricity problem’.

In part, it’s the result of the hyper-technical focus of data teams, looking to solve technical and data problems before business problems. Any amount of ad hoc coding, making elegant data pipelines, and subscribing to yet another platform or dashboard is unlikely to solve any real business problem.

And in part it’s the result of the siloed nature of businesses and a failure of leadership to invest in the planning tools and structures necessary to make data more useable by and useful to businesses.

“Genius doesn’t scale,” observes Elizabeth. “But neither should management treat the data team as a concierge service.” Without the application of empathy, techniques such as Design Thinking, and listening to the voice of the customer, she’s not optimistic many organisations will be able to successfully bridge this divide. And there are responsibilities to address this on both sides.

Sam draws two analogies – that great academics don’t necessarily make great administrators, however close they may be to a Nobel Prize or being the most widely-respected individual in their field; and, data visualisation is a great skill, but working out the story has to come before any application of Tableau, PowerBI, or any other graphical software. In the same way, the best programmers don’t necessarily make the best data leaders.

Elizabeth concludes by focusing our attention on the unintended consequences of the “banality of evil”; of factoring in religion, gender, sexuality into algorithms and those factors being used to deny groups access to healthcare, finance, or housing. Sam compares this with the Chinese Citizen Score, parallels of which are being built into code serving (and categorising) citizens right across the world.

EXTERNAL LINKS

D3M Labs blog – https://d3mlabs.de

Elizabeth’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethpress/

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