Enabling data maturity

Penguin Random House’s Pete Williams on riding the data maturity curve, people and data literacy and readiness to enable and exploit
June 8, 2023

This article, sponsored by Fivetran, originally appeared in Tech-Exec Magazine. This is an abridged version of that story - read the full article on Tech-Exec Magazine here.

How do you manage chaos? In the context of organisation-wide data and culture transformation, more than likely a perfectly relevant and fair question. It's one that Pete Williams remembers well and, somewhat fortuitously given his subsequent experience in leading complex transformation journeys for major organizations, he had the right answer for, even when asked at interview early in his career 

“I was moving from the technology side of the organization to the business side as part of a finance transformation project,” Williams recalls of the encounter. “And, very simply, my answer was ‘I don't think I can’. Even at that stage I realised that, if you're a confident project manager or leader, chaos will happen and this type of work is never as you planned. All projects have a momentum of their own. What you can do is focus on the objectives and the moment you see an opportunity to nudge forward you go for it. That was 20 years ago and I've never Forgotten the lesson. It's exactly how data strategy works still goes.

“Think of it like a giant game of pinball,” he laughs. “My job, then and today, is to make sure momentum and focus is in the direction that me, my team, and the organisation needs to be, that we don't bleed out of direction too far - even though there will be valuable and necessary detours - and keep focused on the end game. I now know from experience that any data strategy evolves in this way; the one I wrote when I joined Penguin Random House in 2019 is still about 85% accurate now. It's going in the right direction. Do I have everything I want? No. But we've already taken the organistion to a fundamentally different place.”

Establish, enable, exploit

For Williams and Penguin Random House, that strategy and focus has been on the creation of a data literate ecosystem that uses the data available to the organisation to generate business outcomes, enable better and faster decision making, and add value. His strategy model is centered around the concept of the three ‘Es’ of data maturity; Establish, Enable, and Exploit.

We spoke with Williams in the late-2021, discussing in detail the data-driven change and behaviours behind the data journey, the building of the data literate ecosystem and how it is underpinned by data, tools, and analysts, the importance of data being ‘owned’ by the business, and how to encourage the ideas, questions, and leadership that fosters an enabling culture. He was very much in the Establish phase of his strategy model, in which the focus is on building a strong, secure and trusted foundation to support the company’s data ambition. Of course, a lot can change it a little over a year.

“The pace of change has increased,” he reflects. “But, as you progress along that maturity curve and through the three ‘Es’, that's natural. You're moving from a position where you're creating and selling your story and ambitions to the organisation to put it in a place where it has the structure and capability to achieve the objectives, to then pushing into the second Enable phase. The people you're working with, the style of work and the focus changes and the pace picks up, so it's now about keeping the momentum, making what we've done relevant to more people, and driving the curiosity, digital processes and skills to ultimately move into the third, Exploit phase .”

Building strong foundations

According to Williams’ model, the Establish phase is foundational. In the case of Penguin it centred on several steps around breaking down silos to remove confusion and reduce work duplication, embedding data governance to bring greater trust and confidence, and providing flexible and accessible analytics solutions that solve problems and can adapt it to evolving needs.

“In this phase the initiation use case and expected outcome, for us, was around sales reporting, view of the market and opportunities to drive revenues,” explains Williams. “We tried to make our work much more sustainable and adaptable to the world around us and, as a result, our platform has become more efficient to load data in, produces more visible data outcomes, and the observability of what's moving where is better than ever. Because of that high quality foundation, we've also been able to move sideways and to ingest more data

“One of the big projects since we last spoke, that really helped establish the credibility of my team, was building a central digital media measurement platform,” he adds. “It was essentially a way to track the commercial impact of our digital marketing spend, providing real visibility of the return on ad spend from digital marketing channels for the UK organisation, and properly understanding whether it was impacting sales and adding to the bottom line. This kind of marketing capability, which simply hadn't been possible before, only happened because of our new people, their understanding of how we work and our capabilities, and the use of tools like Fivetran, dbt through snowflake and Power BI. To have such great success as a result of the first ‘E’ really enabled us to push into the second phase.”

This article, sponsored by Fivetran, originally appeared in Tech-Exec Magazine. This is an abridged version of that story - read the full article on Tech-Exec Magazine here.

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Data insights
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Enabling data maturity

Enabling data maturity

June 8, 2023
June 8, 2023
Enabling data maturity
Penguin Random House’s Pete Williams on riding the data maturity curve, people and data literacy and readiness to enable and exploit

This article, sponsored by Fivetran, originally appeared in Tech-Exec Magazine. This is an abridged version of that story - read the full article on Tech-Exec Magazine here.

How do you manage chaos? In the context of organisation-wide data and culture transformation, more than likely a perfectly relevant and fair question. It's one that Pete Williams remembers well and, somewhat fortuitously given his subsequent experience in leading complex transformation journeys for major organizations, he had the right answer for, even when asked at interview early in his career 

“I was moving from the technology side of the organization to the business side as part of a finance transformation project,” Williams recalls of the encounter. “And, very simply, my answer was ‘I don't think I can’. Even at that stage I realised that, if you're a confident project manager or leader, chaos will happen and this type of work is never as you planned. All projects have a momentum of their own. What you can do is focus on the objectives and the moment you see an opportunity to nudge forward you go for it. That was 20 years ago and I've never Forgotten the lesson. It's exactly how data strategy works still goes.

“Think of it like a giant game of pinball,” he laughs. “My job, then and today, is to make sure momentum and focus is in the direction that me, my team, and the organisation needs to be, that we don't bleed out of direction too far - even though there will be valuable and necessary detours - and keep focused on the end game. I now know from experience that any data strategy evolves in this way; the one I wrote when I joined Penguin Random House in 2019 is still about 85% accurate now. It's going in the right direction. Do I have everything I want? No. But we've already taken the organistion to a fundamentally different place.”

Establish, enable, exploit

For Williams and Penguin Random House, that strategy and focus has been on the creation of a data literate ecosystem that uses the data available to the organisation to generate business outcomes, enable better and faster decision making, and add value. His strategy model is centered around the concept of the three ‘Es’ of data maturity; Establish, Enable, and Exploit.

We spoke with Williams in the late-2021, discussing in detail the data-driven change and behaviours behind the data journey, the building of the data literate ecosystem and how it is underpinned by data, tools, and analysts, the importance of data being ‘owned’ by the business, and how to encourage the ideas, questions, and leadership that fosters an enabling culture. He was very much in the Establish phase of his strategy model, in which the focus is on building a strong, secure and trusted foundation to support the company’s data ambition. Of course, a lot can change it a little over a year.

“The pace of change has increased,” he reflects. “But, as you progress along that maturity curve and through the three ‘Es’, that's natural. You're moving from a position where you're creating and selling your story and ambitions to the organisation to put it in a place where it has the structure and capability to achieve the objectives, to then pushing into the second Enable phase. The people you're working with, the style of work and the focus changes and the pace picks up, so it's now about keeping the momentum, making what we've done relevant to more people, and driving the curiosity, digital processes and skills to ultimately move into the third, Exploit phase .”

Building strong foundations

According to Williams’ model, the Establish phase is foundational. In the case of Penguin it centred on several steps around breaking down silos to remove confusion and reduce work duplication, embedding data governance to bring greater trust and confidence, and providing flexible and accessible analytics solutions that solve problems and can adapt it to evolving needs.

“In this phase the initiation use case and expected outcome, for us, was around sales reporting, view of the market and opportunities to drive revenues,” explains Williams. “We tried to make our work much more sustainable and adaptable to the world around us and, as a result, our platform has become more efficient to load data in, produces more visible data outcomes, and the observability of what's moving where is better than ever. Because of that high quality foundation, we've also been able to move sideways and to ingest more data

“One of the big projects since we last spoke, that really helped establish the credibility of my team, was building a central digital media measurement platform,” he adds. “It was essentially a way to track the commercial impact of our digital marketing spend, providing real visibility of the return on ad spend from digital marketing channels for the UK organisation, and properly understanding whether it was impacting sales and adding to the bottom line. This kind of marketing capability, which simply hadn't been possible before, only happened because of our new people, their understanding of how we work and our capabilities, and the use of tools like Fivetran, dbt through snowflake and Power BI. To have such great success as a result of the first ‘E’ really enabled us to push into the second phase.”

This article, sponsored by Fivetran, originally appeared in Tech-Exec Magazine. This is an abridged version of that story - read the full article on Tech-Exec Magazine here.

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