28 April 2011
Because, in a sense it's what they do.
GuildOne Business Operations Manager Charlie Locke remembers some of the best advice he got straight from the mouth of a Fortune 500 CEO.
The Good Ol’ Days
When I was in my first few years of University, I had, hands down, the best summer job amongst my friends. Whilst everyone else was off to bus tables for their parents’ friends or pretend they knew how to paint houses for the summer, I managed to land a job as a "property manager" (use fingers for quotation) for a Fortune 500 CEO's cottage in Ontario's cottage country. A Canadian success story, he would bring his family up from Silicon Valley to spend his summers where his roots resided. For me, I cut the grass, washed the boats, did a little cooking here and there, and hosted his frequent parties. And that was a hard day.
Since I'd been completing my business degree at the time, I took every chance I could to pick this guy's brain about anything and everything. Endless summer sunsets we spent on the dock, talking about life, family, and business. I ended up working for his company for three years after school and inherently a mentor-student relationship was born.
"So what does a CEO actually do?" I asked.
Half expecting some sort of long-winded, jargon-laden response, I was surprised when he answered, "It's pretty simple, actually. I surround myself with people that are smarter than me and I get them talking to each other."
"Well, that doesn't seem very hard," I gleaned.
"Ha! You try getting a task-oriented CIO with a very strong technical background to talk to my head of marketing who focuses on vision rather than execution. Now that's a dead end conversation," he laughed. "I have the task of finding a common plane for these two very different sources of information to communicate effectively so that our company-wide goals are met."
He continued, "As with most business problems, the answer is simple, but making it happen is the difficult part. In this case, bringing people together towards solving a common business problem is very difficult, and if you don't know how to get one side to make sense to the other, you're hooped...." he paused. "I do that well. That's why I'm the CEO."
Since I'd been completing my business degree at the time, I took every chance I could to pick this guy's brain about anything and everything. Endless summer sunsets we spent on the dock, talking about life, family, and business. I ended up working for his company for three years after school and inherently a mentor-student relationship was born.
The years and years of a CEO’s only interaction with their data being a fancy graph is starting to fade... these reports don't mean jack if the data populating them hasn't been integrated...
Still, to this day, there is one conversation that stuck out in my mind and it started with a very simple question that most of us think is too stupid to ask, but we were on our fourth beer by that point...
"So what does a CEO actually do?" I asked.
Half expecting some sort of long-winded, jargon-laden response, I was surprised when he answered, "It's pretty simple, actually. I surround myself with people that are smarter than me and I get them talking to each other."
"Well, that doesn't seem very hard," I gleaned.
"Ha! You try getting a task-oriented CIO with a very strong technical background to talk to my head of marketing who focuses on vision rather than execution. Now that's a dead end conversation," he laughed. "I have the task of finding a common plane for these two very different sources of information to communicate effectively so that our company-wide goals are met."
He continued, "As with most business problems, the answer is simple, but making it happen is the difficult part. In this case, bringing people together towards solving a common business problem is very difficult, and if you don't know how to get one side to make sense to the other, you're hooped...." he paused. "I do that well. That's why I'm the CEO."
Getting Your Data to Talk to Each Other
Now, it would be naive to state that all CEOs live by this mantra, but I couldn't help and think how closely it relates to the data management problems companies face and how my company, GuildOne, is working to remedy such issues. Perhaps, that is why recently, over the last 10 years, industry has heard the phrases "data integration" and "data management" creep into the vocabulary of the CEO. My old boss essentially brings intelligent people (data) together and has them to speak (integrate) with each other to make better decisions. At the heart, this is exactly what data management is – providing an environment for your data to speak to each other so that you can make faster and better business decisions.
The years and years of a CEO’s only interaction with their data being a fancy graph, or Excel report generated nightly, is starting to fade. It is basically for the pure reason that these graphs and reports are being generated from disparate data sources, from environments where your data is not speaking to each other. Therefore, albeit visually appealing and stamped with some level of approval, these reports don't mean jack if the data populating them hasn't been integrated with each other.
So the focus has shifted from what the report looks like to how we can trust the data that the report was built with. The CEO starts asking about data integration. Senior management hears murmurs of data health. Mid-management looks to IT. IT points the finger back to the business. Where to start?
As my mentor said, "The answer is simple."
Get your data talking to each other so you can trust your reports and make faster and better business decisions. "Making it happen is the difficult part," he maintained.
The years and years of a CEO’s only interaction with their data being a fancy graph, or Excel report generated nightly, is starting to fade. It is basically for the pure reason that these graphs and reports are being generated from disparate data sources, from environments where your data is not speaking to each other. Therefore, albeit visually appealing and stamped with some level of approval, these reports don't mean jack if the data populating them hasn't been integrated with each other.
So the focus has shifted from what the report looks like to how we can trust the data that the report was built with. The CEO starts asking about data integration. Senior management hears murmurs of data health. Mid-management looks to IT. IT points the finger back to the business. Where to start?
As my mentor said, "The answer is simple."
Get your data talking to each other so you can trust your reports and make faster and better business decisions. "Making it happen is the difficult part," he maintained.
The cool thing is, GuildOne has been making it happen for the last decade.
