The Tenets of a High-impact Data Team

At Count, we believe data teams should be more than just dashboard builders and instead be the driving force of business development in their organizations. But what does it actually mean for a data team to stop being a support function and actually start to help drive more results? In this video, I'm gonna walk you through the four principles, the four tenets of what it means to be a high impact data team and tell you how Count can help you make this change even faster. So the first tenet is the concept of operational clarity. This is the idea that rather than flooding the business with loads of reports and data, the data team instead is working to create a very simple, concise view of business performance. The idea is that the data team is creating a signal which stands out amongst all the noise of day-to-day information that floods the business, and instead, everyone has a clear view of what's really going on and what really matters. There are lots of ways of driving operational clarity from really good metric definitions to removing duplicate reports. But one of the best ways of doing it is producing metric maps. Metric maps are the idea of laying out your metrics as metric trees, process flow maps, so every metric is in context and you're visualizing the business, not just your data. This is one of the big strengths of Count and how we can use the canvas to lay out your business and your metrics in one view so you can really see exactly what is going on. The second tenet is the idea that data teams can become their organization's problem solvers. Data teams love solving problems, but often they can be treated like answer machines providing data for a problem that isn't fully understood. At their best, data teams can provide the structure and critical thinking to help their organization reach a deeper level of understanding on their biggest problems. When you're making a difficult decision, the methodology of your problem solve matters as much as the end number. And in Count, you can use the clarity of canvas and whiteboarding tools to provide data and structure and business context in one place to help the business and the data team work through a problem in a really meaningful and trusted way. A lot of data teams understandably want to help the wider organization answer their own questions and rely on the data team less. This is an important lever of efficiency. But it's key we remember the goal is not to reduce the amount of time the data team spends with the business, but instead free up more time so the data team can improve the decision making quality and speed across a wider range of use cases. For example, how can the data team work with the company board to improve its decision making processes as it runs up to its next meeting? What decisions can the data team just automate and remove any human involvement because they're happening at a very transactional level? This is where account semantic layer is really powerful. It gives you that governed data model which allows the wider company to answer its own questions as they need to, but also can be used by the data team for its more advanced analytical problem solving and exploratory analysis. The final tenant is this idea of measuring yourself. It's very easy for data teams to spend time optimizing things that the business doesn't understand or see. And instead, it's important to remember that the biggest cost of the data team is usually in its payroll spend, not its tooling or compute cost. It's therefore really important that we can understand where we're spending our time and focusing on things which really drive business impact. This is where accounts telemetry to let you understand where you're working and what you're working on can be really helpful and our in memory computational engine. So whatever you're doing, you're not spending even more cost on your data warehouse than you need to. So there you have it. Those are the four tenants of a high impact data team. For a lot of our customers, these are the north star metrics they're using to drive value in their business and focus on what really matters. If you have any feedback or questions around the tenants, we're always happy to chat. Just drop us a line, and we'll get back to you.