6 Signs that your company is doing data wrong (or not at all)

We often ignore or dismiss the signs that our company is doing data wrong. This is because we are caught up in the day to day or simply because we lack awareness.
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It is most certainly not an efficient way forward and in extreme cases can cause day to day operations to come to a screeching halt.

These symptoms left alone never get better. Companies who find themselves in this situation require foundational work in building a scalable data infrastructure. The end product of this infrastructure should be self service data reporting such that anyone in the company can answer non trivial data questions for themselves without depending on the data team.
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Stakeholders have no faith in the accuracy of numbers.

As a result the company makes decisions on hunches rather than facts.

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Trivial reports

Seemingly trivial reports taking much longer to generate or worse yet cannot be accurately generated.

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Prioritization

Based on who screams the loudest. As a result priorities are constantly changing and it’s difficult to have any sense of continuity. Every task is seemingly business critical.
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Multiple sources of truth for data

Google spreadsheets become the language of data reporting.Sales, marketing and product become gatekeepers of their own micro data sets and numbers do not match across the board.
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Analyst Bottleneck: Stress and Errors

Data is crunched by analyst who becomes the bottleneck for decision making. High stress work environment with late working hours. Likely decreased uptime of services due to unforced human error.
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Hyped Data Solutions Disappoint

Data team is constantly talking about new infrastructure or features which are going to solve all problems. If these features ever make it to production, they never live up to the hype & are ultimately not adopted universally by the company.

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