Launching Data Merit. The reason why I do it.

A life of data

I have lived in the context of data for all of my professional career.  When I look back at that journey, I realize I have spent a lot of time on the "solution" side.  I started building solutions for finance at Siemens went on to Coopers & Lybrand and built several applications for waste management.  I then rolled in the world of human resources ERP systems.  When I embarked on what seemed a non-technical job at the Flemish Government, I very quickly learned what the complexity was of managing the data of half a country.  Most of all, I remember the significance of a 2% error rate, multiplied by 3 million addresses.  The business case for data quality care was easily made, way before anyone had heard of Chief Data Officers.  Then came 17 years of entrepreneurship and passionately overseeing the building of countless business intelligence and enterprise planning systems at Numius and Deloitte in a variety of industries such as Education, Pharma, Circular Economy, Chemicals, etc.

Meet the boardroom

It wasn't until I joined BNP Paribas Fortis's Executive Committee as their first ever Chief Data Officer that I started to fully grasp the importance of clearly articulating why we did what we did with a 230-person team, spread over one agile tribe and two agile centers of expertise.  In a boardroom, the concern is not about whether you have adopted the data mesh religion or not.  Nobody will care about the difference between the data warehouse, the data lake or the data lakehouse - who makes these things up anyway...   People in boardrooms are not waiting for you to make them "data literate".   - as a matter of fact, most executives are very data driven by default - or they have people working for them who are.  The board members that I worked with had to care about the cost of capital, about being perfectly compliant with anti money laundering legislation, about reacting to a pandemic and securing the financial well-being of a couple of million people and thousands of companies, about securing a 24/7 reliable financial system for their clients, about providing a long-term sustainable work environment for their employees, about shifting the traditional customer channels to the new ones, etc. 

Data and AI, so what?

Data in itself is not gold.  It is not oil.  Or maybe it is.  Because data and oil are worthless if you have no application, no purpose.  Their valuation depends entirely on their use in the context at hand.  I now realize that data and AI investments need to...

• have their reason of existence explicitly linked to these major boardroom themes
• can originate from a cool technical proof-of-concept but need to quickly get business value testing strategies attached to them
• have a value calculation as from the moment of inception
• need to have their value monitored as part of their governance
• be abandoned or decommissioned if value generation is not sustainable
• be supported by repeated communication, not so much about "how it was done" but "why it was done"

So why Data Merit?

As you may have gathered by now, I am making it my mission to make all those wonderful technologies and those that want to implement them, more economically durable.  The data and AI profession needs durability so that it can mature and contribute to solving those extremely tough problems our companies and society face.