Is there anything about your company culture that makes your job as a data leader easier or more challenging?
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The complexity of my organization stems from supporting a group of companies, each with its own priorities, business leaders, data sources, and focuses. Instead of supporting a single sales organization or finance department, I manage multiple ones. Upon joining, I had to adapt certain philosophies regarding ways of working and establishing a data organization due to the unique nature of my current situation. This necessitated the creation of data product teams for each individual company or business unit.
The second element around our company is the fact we are private and innovation and speed is part of our culture. This necessitated us moving to an agile delivery framework / product management approach to keep up with the speed of change.
As we all know data solutions (whether BI, AI, Data Eng or Data mgt) are different than apps - with extra complexities and sometimes those complexities get overlooked or underestimated.
What makes my job as a data leader more challenging is project fatigue. Working in the public higher educational industry, we have so many compliances and mandates from the Texas Coordinating Board. Not enough time work on continuous improvement of processes, development, and professional development within department. Also balancing operational tasks with projects, the workload cycle is not constant enough to identify gaps in productivity. Being a data management director for over 21 years, ensuring stakeholders have access to the right data and maintain the integrity of the data is an ongoing task. Not mention resource planning and management is also a challenge. However, I always to like to look for the positive. We live in exciting times where AI is everywhere and in the workplace. Many of my team members are finding ways to use AI, like Copolit or ChatGPT to assist with development. AI is proven to be a huge factor in the workplace.
The pace of demands borne out of critically important strategic needs along with a deep need to modernize in order to create analytic capacity and capabilities can create budgetary challenges.