At Data Driven 2018, Brian Shield, the Chief Information Officer of the Boston Red Sox, gave a riveting and humorous presentation on using data in business and building a data driven culture. His career has been spent at some impressive companies doing ground breaking things with data, and we were excited to have him share his experience and insights. He shared some lessons learned about building a data driven culture, and his perspectives on how his teams used data at companies like FTD, the Weather Channel and The Red Sox.
Some of his key learnings included:
- Understand your culture
- Move faster than you think possible
- Measure everything
- It starts and ends with data integrity, the single source of truth
- Democratize your data through the company
- Automate where you can, but don’t forget about people
- Data Visualization and storytelling are essential and as important as the data
- Rely on data not instincts or institutional knowledge
- Focus on data literacy and access to all data
- Know what data skills to hire and when
- Find quick wins and leverage past successes
Brian walked through each of these points in his presentation from Data Driven in Miami.
Data driven enterprises have a lot to gain and little to lose from adopting these suggestions. Which points has your enterprise implemented already and how has your business been affected?
Watch Brian’s full presentation from Data Driven