Blindspots and Purple Ponies: A Leadership Paradox
(Voir ce lien pour la version française)
Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events, or actual organizations is purely coincidental.
A few years ago, I was pulled to a meeting titled "introduction". Most of the time, when people send you a meeting invite, they explain what the meeting is about and include a brief agenda, but this was blank. With 13 to 17 meetings per day, I figured this was just another one to sit through, listen, and somehow define yet another action plan that would probably collect dust.
Bianca showed up in the virtual call, and I recognised her face from my previous role in France. Infrastructure team, project coordination - and now somehow IT director of a whole business line. I mentally connected the dots: another MBA from one of those prestigious schools that HR religiously flags as "high potential" even when there's no evidence of actual impact. Your fancy diploma from Grandes Écoles automatically propels you to the top talent bucket, regardless of whether you've ever delivered anything that moved the needle on the company's bottom line. The corporate equivalent of social promotion. That's just how the game works.
The problem statement she launched into was the broken record I'd heard a thousand times in my data & BI role: "we have systems but can't cross analyse," "business is drowning in Excel workflows," "Mr X wastes 3 days just cleaning data every week," "teams built Power BI dashboards but now spend more time updating them than doing their actual jobs," "finance closes the month in panic mode because they're stuck in data prep instead of analysis"... I could have recited her entire list of problems before she even opened her mouth.
The Strategic Value of User Research
I refrained from interrupting, though. One thing I love when starting projects is speaking with everyone who'll be impacted. I like letting them explain what they're trying to solve, how long they've been struggling, what they've already tried and failed at, what quick wins they're desperate for, and what dreams they've given up on. Then we interview everyone who owns a piece of the workflow. It's exhausting - a parade of the same "manual processes" complaints - but you get something crucial you can't capture any other way: the feeling.
The feeling of how that small broken thing is destroying someone's workday, and how fixing it could free up a colleague who loves financial analysis but instead spends weeks just prepping data. The difference between the executive who thinks they know what the problem is versus the person on the floor actually grinding through it daily. A strategic reconnaissance that reveals the true battleground.
I had a good laugh when I read that quote from a Gartner senior analyst saying "IT needs to do a better job of understanding business value." Come on! Keith Mann clearly needs to spend a few months in the trenches with us, delivering actual projects in a real company. IT staff and engineers aren't lacking intelligence! Except if you purposely hire not-so-bright ones to burn through your budget and crash your project into a wall, which I don't think any company does intentionally. Your tech people are desperate to understand how the business actually works; they just need someone to show them.
The Hidden Cost of Siloed Pain
But here's what fascinates me: every business line hides their pain from other business units and corporate functions. Having the capacity to establish rapport with individuals is the most important skill anyone providing a service should have. People will not volunteer to walk you through their pain, show you the ugly things they're trying to get away from, but with which they're silently suffocating day after day because they haven't been offered a solution so far.
If you dig around, you'll see that business units in competition with each other hide many of their struggles. A lot of the same workflows in your company are being delivered through different departments in different business units, with subtle variations from one another. Further digging shows that many share the same pain, but people just carry on their short-term broken solution around, not talking to each other about it.
That's where your company is probably bleeding money: x4 for frustration and negative feelings, x3 for the money you are losing because the real business issues are not clear and thus not getting addressed nor fixed, 2x for energy that is lost in the process, and 1x for the time everyone is spending in carrying the pain around. That gives you a compelling ROI for negotiation!
The Business-IT Alignment Gap
My 15+ years of project delivery and IT discussions has shown me that this desire to understand isn't theoretical. IT teams are eager to see how their work fits into the larger business context.
On the other hand, the business has their own job, and the project is a new task on top of all the tasks that have been piling up on their desk. They have neither the patience nor the time to take the IT team on site, give them a visit to the location. Or explaining the whole process of what their mission and purpose is, who their clients are, what is the whole workflow, where does the workflow we are trying to enhance fits in the full process, and how resolving it is going to help people and the business.
You need to provide a mission statement, and the mission statement has to touch people's heart, has to make it about people that are impacted. You have to put the time to walk someone through the big picture, then zoom in to what you want to enhance and why. You should have the patience to simplify a complex business process to a person who has no idea of what your job is about, and doesn't know the jargon you are using. It is pedagogy, and if you are bad at it, your money will be wasted in multiple projects, while your pain stays.
The Process Documentation Imperative
A common mistake is to start a project without doing your homework. The number of times the business launches a project, writes a paragraph about the issue they are trying to solve, and then nothing. There has been no preparation, no workshop to collect the business stakeholders, listen to everyone, write down the "wishlist" and explain in words, and with examples what the business is trying to achieve. This is where most of the project budget, 70% of it is wasted: in doing and redoing because those involved, the end users, the real stakeholders, weren't involved and didn't take the time to do their homework.
You can't just throw money at your problem and mumble "solve it." If I don't know what you want, I might deliver a purple pony because hey, you said you needed to get to "point B" and this fabulous purple pony will not only get you there, but make you the talk of the town! Who else shows up to board meetings on a purple pony? Then three months later you'll casually mention "Oh, but I wanted to get there by bus with a professional driver." Great! Now you're stuck with feeding a pony AND paying for that bus. Every time you reveal another requirement, you're just making your situation more absurd and expensive.
The "Fog of Data" Principle
Going back to the business line we were dealing with, the good thing was their willingness to walk us through their processes. They resisted this at the beginning, gave us a thin specification of less than 10 pages, but once they saw we had to redo the first feature because 3 persons had not provided the details, Bianca understood after our explanations that her lean project budget can not be wasted for the next features.
Back to the "white board", now it took them a month to gather the right requirements and get everyone involved. And bingo! The second feature was delivered with all expected details. Everyone put the time and energy, business to explain and IT to understand and build upon. This is where the collaboration comes back on the frontline.
The most intriguing, complex and challenging part was the manufacturing facet. The business line had multiple manufacturing locations, and a system they were using for their work, but something was missing, according to the director of manufacturing. He started his allocution with: "I know there are issues, and the team is willing to get them solved, but we don't seem to be able to put our finger on them".
The manufacturing staff used the system to enter a lot of different information from the reception of material, to inspection, quality issues, then manufacturing steps etc, that were interconnected within the operation workflow. The strange part was that they weren't flowing properly in the system. The manufacturing teams were using one of those legacy systems that many companies still rely on worldwide. It was a software that has stayed "dans son jus" as we say in French, meaning it's preserved in its original juice like a vintage artifact, completely resistant to customization or the last decade of technological advances.
Once the teams understood how the information should be interconnected, building pipelines and models that showcase the end-to-end workflow and the relationship between everything, was the easy part. Of course, when I say "easy," I can practically feel my team collectively rolling their eyes at me across the office. But considering the nightmare projects they've handled, I'm confident they'd agree this was relatively painless, once we had the actual requirements.
A few months down the road, all features delivered and 6 user acceptance testing, and deployment in production later, a colourful collection of manual processes, frustrated colleagues, and unseeingly complex manufacturing issues were transformed to automated pipelines and BI applications. They would come in the morning, open the dashboard they needed, check the information and then go about analysing, and resolving real business issues.
There is something rewarding in knowing you have given so many people their time back, that their energy will be used for positive impact instead of fighting with elements and carrying around frustration. One of the most rewarding moments of my career was this project's closing session, when the manufacturing director delivered his final speech: "There was a fog of data in my head, following me around like a cloud for the past 5 years, and I have been unable to resolve it. You just resolved this brain-fog, and now we are seeing clearly what we have to work on everyday to get things better. Thank you."
It was a short speech, and one of the most rewarding ones.
The Strategic Intersection: Corporate Strategy Meets Data Strategy
The lessons learnt from the experience is that your data strategy and corporate strategy needs to be talked through with your business, and each business unit around the globe will have their point of view of what they would like from it. When your data strategy and corporate strategy operate in isolation, you're essentially running your company with a blindfold, occasionally peeking through small holes. Remember the manufacturing director's 'fog of data'? That wasn't his personal operational inconvenience! It was a symptom of strategic blindness that costs organizations millions in missed opportunities and misdirected resources. His five-year fog represents the typical timeline in which companies operate without seeing their own reality clearly.
This visibility becomes transformative when it crosses departmental boundaries. The same workflows often exist across different departments with subtle variations, but without the cross-functional visibility that a proper data strategy provides, these shared challenges remain invisible. People carry around their broken short-term solutions, not realizing that a collective approach would solve everyone's pain points simultaneously.
Get your business people together to write down what the process is. The business processes and workflows shouldn't be in people's heads. If it is the case, it is an urgent project you should address. All stakeholders must participate in reading the specification and commenting it, if they haven't been included in the workshops. Never just ask the director and consider your homework done. They're floating too high in the organizational stratosphere to know the operational details. Directors might feel the general temperature of problems, but they don't have their fingers in the boiling hot water that's scalding their teams daily. The director will tell you what they think you should fix, but the people with the blisters will tell you what actually needs fixing.
Get your IT staff to read the business requirement as it is getting redacted and ask for their feedback, ask if everything is clear to them or otherwise they should comment on the document or hold a clarification meeting with the business owner of that process. Get a process engineer to streamline it; even a junior one right out of school can do it, if you don't rush the person and give the person a few months.
There's a reason Amazon has an army of process engineers. If you want streamlined processes, you have to put the money where your mouth is. And please tell me you already have a proper tool for your business workflows? You're an international company and you're just now realizing you need this? Cold chill down my spine! Let me pull my investments out of your stock immediately!
The Continuous Strategic Alignment Principle
Lastly, keep in mind that this is an iterative process. Your business evolves and so do the workflows and processes within your company, hence the importance of having a proper tool for business workflow that is connected to the architecture data, application features, data integration and data lineage etc. When the foundation (your workflow) gets changed, all the other parties impacted are alerted to move the pieces in the right direction.
Final words, know the collaboration, resilience and perseverance score of the people in your company. You need the right people for the right job, and collaboration is the quality that comes first. Your data strategy can only become a strategic enabler when the human elements – collaboration, communication, and documentation – are treated as strategic priorities rather than afterthoughts.
When you clear the fog of data, you transform your strategic visibility. And in today's business landscape, seeing clearly might be the only sustainable competitive advantage left.
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Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual events, or actual organizations is purely coincidental.
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