Publication  

Description of the Book
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Today, every aspect of people's lives is profoundly influenced by data. Artificial Intelligence fueled by data is further pushing the envelope with unprecedented intensity and speed. Tremendous power can be harnessed from data. However, serious challenges also threaten to turn the data environment that people interact with into utter chaos: What exactly does the data mean? Is it secure? Is it trustworthy? How to handle the ever-increasing data size and complexity without being confused, frustrated, or even drowned?

This book proposes a holistic approach of building healthy data ecosystems to overcome the challenges. Drawing on real-world pains and successes, Hong Gui presents a systematic strategy that encompasses organizational culture, leadership, systems architecture, staffing models, and more, which must be employed to empower people in the digital world. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of this strategy: • Business ownership: Who's in the driver's seat? • Data stewards and data curators: Who are on the front line? • Data ecosystem landscape: Where are the treasures? • Collaboration between operations and information services: How are people empowered? • Shape for the future: What about AI?

Speaking from hands-on experience, Gui leads readers on an intellectual adventure and problem-solving journey to confront one of the defining challenges of our time: how to tame the dragon of big data and unlock its full potential.

 

Sample Reading
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Data is a means to an end - its value is manifested in providing people the ability to understand the business, and to act and achieve successful outcomes - after all, people’s engagement, productivity, and ingenuity are the most important factors for an organization to be competitive in today’s world. Everything laid out in this book for building a healthy data ecosystem, including the guiding principles, strategies, and tactics, aims towards this ultimate goal - making data an empowering factor for our workforce. To this end, some infrastructural changes are needed if the current state of the data ecosystem you are living in isn’t satisfactory.

 

The framework of separating business operations and information services in many organizations currently presents significant challenges for taking control of the increasingly complicated and big data. A new talent pool, the domain expert, is proposed in this chapter, targeting to accomplish the three-fold mission through their unique skill set. This role looks like a hybrid of the traditional business analyst and data analyst roles, but goes deeper and broader in their capability with data. The domain experts trailblaze the complex terrain of both in-app and in-house data products, provide expert consultations to both the business and technical teams, and work with operational staff closely to increase their competency with data. This talent pool, when established, will become a powerful force that drives data usage to the next level for businesses.

 

The other fundamental area is to provide data users the information that they need with a systematic people-process-tools approach, so they are sufficiently equipped, and feel confident to take actions based on their understanding and trust of data. The key to success in this area is to have an organization level leadership over the entire data ecosystem, usually through the CDO office, which sets and enforces the metadata standards, builds and maintains the processes and tools. When data users have the information they need at their fingertips, they will use data more effectively because they know what it means, how to apply it, and have a sense of control over it. They would never want to go back to the days when they trekked in a data environment that is murky and treacherous. As it says, “knowledge begets knowledge”. Data users will become more confident to raise questions about data, and be emboldened to make decisions and take actions based on the facts and insights obtained from data.