Blog: Jill Dyche

« Who Put Data Quality in My CRM? News from Microsoft and Group 1 | Main | The Many Faces of the Center of Excellence »

The Fierce Conversation

In which Jill loses sleep (again) about a client conundrum--and wakes up to a new technique.

If I hear “Forty is the new thirty” one more time I’m gonna punch somebody in the nose. When I turned forty it was almost like my body flipped a switch.

To “Off.”

I have to exercise longer, eat better food, and now there’s something brand new: insomnia. I swear if all women over a certain age who couldn’t sleep had a meeting at 2:30 a.m. we could change the world. Until then, I’ve been getting out my book light and reading a fascinating book called Fierce Conversations.

In her book, author Susan Scott argues that most of us wander through our lives, our relationships, and our jobs never really getting authentic with one another. She insists that our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time and provides some helpful techniques for tuning how we communicate with people in an authentic and powerful way.

I couldn’t help reading the book and thinking about a fierce conversation I should be having with a brand-new client, “Joe,” (I’ve changed the name, obviously—I’m not THAT fierce!), and it would go something like this:

Joe, I want to talk to you about the effect your decision to develop data quality in a piecemeal and homegrown way is having on your company. I’ve heard that the company recently had to pay a series of hefty fines because it couldn’t generate a necessary report for federal regulators. I heard that it wasn’t that you couldn’t build the report, but that the data was so untrustworthy and fraught that executives decided they’d rather pay the fine. As an advisor, I’m concerned that this could lead back to your decision not to take corporate data seriously. And there’s a great deal at stake here. The company will confront this issue again. And I care about the company’s success—its reputation as a business leader could be compromised. And I care about your success, Joe, and don’t want you turning into the poster boy for bad data.

I wanted to alert you to the warning signs I see: lots of programmers writing independent code to clean up and match data. Homegrown householding that’s expensive to maintain. Knowledge workers who don’t trust the data. I want to bring this to your attention early, Joe, the effect some of these decisions are having on your firm and its employees. Please let me in on your thought process here.

It’s direct, it’s engaged, and it’s honest. It’s not hostile and not intended to place blame. The worst that happens is Joe gets defensive, but that’s unlikely. He’s an open-minded guy and he’ll probably want to work together on the risks and possible outcomes.

I’m actually excited by the techniques I’ve learned in Susan Scott’s book. I think that if we could all use similar techniques we could get our executives to consider investing in data quality. I think that, sleep or no sleep, we could change the world—one data element at a time.

Technorati Tags: data quality, fierce conversation, data management

Share: