As expected, “Data Management Has Failed” generated both support and pushback. We found that some practitioners readily admitted the issues privately but were unwilling to do so publicly. all agree privately and more and more are willing to discuss the matter publicly. We think this is a good sign for the profession.
We uncovered all the usual suspects: Lack of alignment, poor turkey whatsapp number data sponsorship, insufficient staff, poor change management, etc. However, none of these satisfied us, so we pushed harder, questioning everything. And it occurred to us: Maybe, just maybe, the problem is the DGs themselves! Part of the DG’s job is to create alignment, earn sponsorship, secure the needed budget, and drive change management (or get those qualified to do so on board). Perhaps DGs don’t have the full range of competencies they need, were misassigned or inadequately trained, or are philosophically unsuited for the job. Or perhaps they were tasked with the impossible, implicitly set up to fail.
This led us to the work of Elliott Jaques. He advised that people had certain innate levels of ability along two (uncorrelated) dimensions [1]:
Their abilities to process increasingly complex and possibly disparate quantities of information
Their abilities to think into the future
To illustrate, a day trader may need to process lots of complex data, but they are only thinking a few minutes into the future, while an urban planner who also must process lots of complex data needs to think way into the future. See these points illustrated in figure.