Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

An Incomplete Education

In which Jill espouses the belief that it’s about where you came from.

I came of age in southern California in the 1970s. It was the era of Frampton Comes Alive!, Vans skate shoes (custom, of course), and the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.” Polyurethane skate wheels had just emerged and a radio station called KMET (“The Mighty Met”) blared from our car stereos when we weren’t playing our 8-tracks.

Once my friends and I started driving we’d career down L.A.’s notorious canyons to a beach called Staircase that only the locals knew. We’d surf and tan in lieu of Algebra II—regular sojourns that in retrospect explain my math skills. My friend Cherie’s dad lived in Topanga Canyon with his much-younger girlfriend and they’d smoke high-grade pot on their porch while my friends and I drank our Tabs and tried furtively to appear jaded. On weekend evenings the sound of acoustic guitar and vocal harmonies would waft up from the canyon below. Cherie’s dad told us it was Crosby, Stills, and Nash jamming with Joni Mitchell in Neil Young’s streamside bungalow.

Maybe for you it’s your mom’s meatloaf. Or perhaps it’s the smell of the pine trees that lined your parents’ driveway. Or the smell of your dad’s Aqua Velva. For me, it’s the redolent canyon chaparral mingled with the top note of Cherie’s dad’s Jamaican Flowertop. They’re the smells of my misspent youth.

I’ve since lived in many places but somehow always return to L.A. I think of this now only to underscore the point that humans like to return what they know. How else to explain the persistent religion around data modeling conventions? Show me a 3rd normal form fanatic and I’ll show you someone who cut their teeth on E/R diagrams. Show me a waterfall methodologist and I’ll show you someone who’s struggling to embrace agile. This type of closely-held belief system is responsible for much of today’s workplace politics. Show me a marketing department that thinks it owns customer data—“Well, if it weren’t for us, there wouldn’t be any customer data,” one smug segment manager told me—and I’ll show you a CMO who won’t sponsor a data governance program. We’ve always done it that way, after all. Why change now? Why change? Ask your CEO. Then go back to where you came from. I dare you.

My Blog is a Weapon. (Not Really. But Hey, Then Again...)

Okay, I have a blog, and I’m not afraid to use it. Welcome to my new Inside the Biz blog on baseline-consulting.com. In this blog, I’ll be focusing on the business value of data and why we’ve only skimmed the surface of its potential. I’ll discuss why the question, “Would you like fries with that?” is NOT customer relationship management, and why information can mean the end of business as usual.

And hey! This blog is on Baseline’s own website, along with some other very insightful blogs, so guess what? We can dangle our participles, we can break the rules, dis the establishment, and get naked! Alright, maybe not get naked, but you get the point.

You see we—or rather the technologies we use—are data hoarders. Our accumulated contacts, e-mails, stock trades, bills paid, purchase records, expense receipts and hundreds if not thousands of other transactions are stored on our hard disks, online accounts, iPods, company databases, ERP systems, and other gadgets. Sometimes these are deliberate decisions, and sometimes they’re not.

Maybe you’re the kind of person that grew up thinking that all this data can be wrangled and corralled into a single capacious database. Maybe I grew up thinking that way too, and maybe, for a time, we were right. But the market is moving in a different direction, and it might be time for us to change our minds. To expand our thinking. To look beyond the comfort zone of technologies and toward developing new processes, indeed new cultures, that support managing our data irrespective of the platforms where it lives. Yes, as a corporate asset. (Sorry, I had pull that one out, but I promise from now on, I’ll use the phrase sparingly.) Because if we’re hoping to manage all our data from a central source, odds are we’re thinking in the past. And the problem of “infoglut” as it’s affectionately known is a problem that affects our collective future.

In this blog, I’ll be musing on new ways to access, manage, deploy, and use information for the betterment of our businesses. I’ll take on some sacred cows and challenge some of the established paradigms. I’ll make some suggestions for how to help our colleagues and, more aptly, our management, to approach corporate information the right way.

After all, no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. My mission for the Inside the Biz blog is not to prevent the snowfall, but to harness the snow for good, use the right tools to make great snowmen, and prevent the disasters before they befall us.