The Hidden Truth About Organisational Data

Every day, your organization creates thousands of data points. But here’s what executives often miss: data isn’t created by systems—it’s created by people through their daily work. Data is created when people interact with your organisation. Understanding this fundamental truth can be the difference between business transformation success and failure. This means we need to get the data-people dependency right. Here are the five essential pillars to build a strong foundation for successful business transformation on:

The Five Pillars of Data Excellence

1. The People Factor: Your Greatest Asset – Your employees are natural problem-solvers. They will:
   
   
   • Find ways to achieve outcomes, regardless of constraint.
   • Create solutions when standard approaches fall short
   • Generate valuable data when properly empowered
   • Shape the organization’s data quality through their daily decisions and actions
   • Key Insight: In the absence of clear direction, people will do what they think is right—making leadership’s role in data operations crucial.

   
   

2. Ways of Working: The Cultural Foundation – How work gets done matters more than how it’s supposed to get done:

• • Informal practices often supersede formal procedures
  • Team dynamics shape data quality more than written policies
  • Collaborative patterns determine data flow and quality
  • Established routines can either enhance or diminish value for people, process, technology, and data
  • Key Insight: Understanding and shaping ways of working is crucial for sustainable data excellence.

  
  

3. The Process Reality: Beyond Documentation – Processes aren’t just flowcharts—they’re the pathways through which value flows:

• • Effective processes naturally encourage adoption
  • Poor processes lead to creative workarounds
  • The best processes align with natural ways of working
  • Sustainable processes adapt to organisational culture and embed innovation
  • Key Insight: When processes align with ways of working, data quality naturally improves.

  
  

4. The Technology Truth: Tools Shape Behavior – Technology decisions have far-reaching implications:

• • Tools shape how people work and collaborate
  • The right tool can transform data quality
  • The wrong tool can entrench poor practices
  • Technology must support, not dictate, ways of working
  • Key Insight: Technology should serve your people and enhance their natural work patterns.

  
  

5. The Data Dimension: Your Strategic Asset – Data is the most overlooked aspect of transformation efforts, yet it’s key to:

• • Informed decision-making
  • Operational excellence
  • Strategic advantage
  • Sustainable transformation
  • Key Insight: Data value multiplies when people, ways of working, processes, and technology align with organizational strategy.

  
  

Why Transformations Fail

The most common reason for transformation failure isn’t technical—it’s cultural. It happens when organizations focus on:

• Systems without considering work patterns
• Processes without considering daily routines
• Data without considering how it’s created
• Technology without understanding ways of working
• Planning without considering how data is affected

The Path Forward

Successful transformation requires:

1. Understanding how data naturally flows in your organization
2. Aligning people, ways of working, processes, and technology
3. Empowering employees to create high-value data
4. Managing data as a strategic asset
5. Nurturing ways of working that support data excellence

Practical Next steps

Successful transformation requires:

1. People – find the people who are the informal ‘go to person’ when it comes to data across your business units. Ask them their number one bugbear. Use their ‘in the trenches’ experience on the ways of working and the impact to operational outcomes. Work the problem, starting backwards from them or the people who ask them to solve the problem. Communicate when things have made a tangible improvement, even if it seems small.
2. Process – make sure you have the basics covered. Ensure all new projects have project plan templates have a section near the top of the document to identify the data required, the data that will be touched, and the data that will be created in the future. Ensure that requirements have been documented before any change project is due to commence.
3. Technology – make sure you have requirements defined before you go shopping! They must cover functional business needs, the non-functional needs (i.e. how available? how fast?, how many?, how secure? how disaster-tolerant? etc.) , the data needed and the quality of the data needed. These requirements must be justifiably prioritised and approved BY THE BUSINESS. A great trick is to also capture at the requirements definition stage what success looks like as a scenario for each. (a “user acceptance test” if you like). If you supply these things to your technology professionals, they can do amazing things for you:  they just need to know what you need!
4. Managing data as a strategic asset – like money, data is valuable. It’s arguably more valuable in that it can be reused and it is inexhaustible. When making strategic plans, not only ask what is the smart thing that we want to be doing, but also how we use our data make this better? We also want to identify any data that we don’t have that could turbocharge our business outcomes. The obviously next step is too, then work out how to get it.
5. Nurturing ways of working that support data excellence –  there is a saying “given no guidance, people will do whatever they see fit or is expedient”. So, the nurturing bit is not just dictating what people should do and how they should do things with data. It is rather understanding how they currently work, how data interacts with that work and then make evolutionary changes that ideally the people who are in the middle of it define. The role of the data professional is to be across tried-and-true good “ways of working’ that look after data. The don’t impose solutions but rather keep them “in their back pocket”  and explore options with the “process executors”.

About Our Approach

Our transformation practice brings a unique, human-centered approach to data management. We understand that successful transformation isn’t just about implementing new systems—it’s about creating an environment where quality data naturally flows from aligned people, ways of working, processes, and technology.

Take Action

Don’t let your transformation initiative become another statistic. Contact our Transformation Practice to learn how we can help you:

• Assess your current data ecosystem
• Align your people, ways of working, processes, and technology
• Create sustainable data excellence
• Transform your organization’s relationship with data