Data Diabetes and the CDO: Are You an Endocrinologist Or Willy Wonka?

Data Diabetes is a term that I coined to describe the challenges that most contemporary organizations have with their use, and sometimes abuse, of data. I suspect that few practitioners in this space would disagree with the notion that data is a challenge for their organization, but I would also argue that few practitioners also recognize that these data challenges aren’t the disease, they are merely the symptoms of Data Diabetes.

So, what is Data Diabetes?

Why is it a problem for organizations?

And what can a data-oriented executive do about it?

Let’s address these questions by first discussing where the term came from, and why it is so apropos of what is going on these days.

Data Diabetes describes how organizations have difficulty converting data into business value. Specifically, data diabetic organizations have difficulty with decision-making. Diabetics have sugar in their body but their disease prevents their body from turning that sugar into life-giving energy. Similarly, a data diabetic organization has data at its disposal, yet, for a variety of reasons they are unable to turn that data into valuable outcomes (i.e., make decisions) as fast as the market demands.

A diabetic will feel hunger and thirst even if they have sugar in their bloodstream because their body cannot use that sugar that is present. If they consume more sugar to feed their thirst, they actually make themselves sicker. Similarly, an executive of a data diabetic organization may hunger for one more report, analysis, or assessment from an ever-larger data lake before they are ready to make a business-critical decision.

They hunger for more data, but if you give it to them, they will likely be even less able to make the decision at hand. They think they have a data problem, but they don’t; they have a decision-making problem. And as with sugar in diabetics, the more data you give them the poorer their decision-making is likely to be.

I realize that this may sound like sacrilege, particularly to my intended audience. However, I believe that there is tremendous experience supporting this notion. Chief Data Officers (CDOs) must face this issue head-on, as organizations who have embraced this role have explicitly stated that data is important to them, and they need to treat it differently than they have in the past.

As such, CDOs likely find themselves being held accountable for treating the symptoms of Data Diabetes (the hunger for more, different, or faster data) without necessarily having the authority to address the underlying disease (inability to make value-driving decisions). Based on my research, to be successful in the CDO role, it is critical that you…

1. …understand the degree to which your organization is Data Diabetic, and
2. if your organization is Data Diabetic, figure out how to properly diagnose and treat your patient.

Deciding to decide

In my recent work on researching organizations’ post-pandemic lessons learned, one theme recurred with every interview, workshop, or discussion I held - organizations continue to struggle with data. They felt that they did not have the information that they required to make good decisions, particularly as the pandemic came upon them so quickly, so unexpectedly, and so Black-Swan-like.

From work-from-home authorization to the deployment of telepresence tools such as Zoom, executives had to make business decisions that they had agonized and prevaricated over for years, over the course of a long weekend. While these executives had wished for more, better, and faster data with which to make these decisions, that simply wasn’t an option in March 2020.

So, what did they do?

They decided, as they had no other choice.

What happened next?

Well across the almost one hundred organizations I surveyed, the result was precisely the same - nothing happened. Or rather, nothing bad happened. The world didn’t come to an end, their workforce didn’t rebel en masse, and their stock price didn’t tank due to the lack of in-person oversight of their workforce. 

Certainly, there were some bumps along the way, and some employees had difficulty adapting to the new remote work paradigm, but for all of the endless analyses, tiger teams, ROI models, risk assessments, and executive offsite sessions dedicated to assessing the risk of adopting work from home, the result was a big nothingburger.

Indeed, most of the organizations I spoke with found that their productivity rose, employee job satisfaction increased, and costs fell significantly. All of the sky-might-fall predictions related to ‘unsupervised work’ pre-COVID proved to not only be wrong, they were in fact, counter-productive.

When more isn’t always better!

What does this have to do with data, and how does this relate to Data Diabetes?

All of that analysis, risk assessment, modeling, and so on that occurs before a decision is made, feels like the right thing to do. Business leaders are paid to constantly assess the balance between risk and reward and to then take measured and calculated risks to remain successful in a responsible manner. We are hard-wired as humans to seek as much information as possible before making a decision. But we are also wired to make life-or-death decisions almost instantly, leveraging intuition and experience to do the right thing.

There are three processes in which humans, and by way of extension human organizations, utilize information: Discover, Defend, and Decide.

• In Discover, we explore our world and seek to understand it. It is the foundation of our hunter instincts as we seek out rewards from our environment.

• Defend is how we protect ourselves from the world. It is our prey instinct. It is how we make our way through a dangerous and mysterious world. It is how we recognize and assess risk.

• Finally, Decide is our adult, human, conscious mind. It is how we balance our desire for rewards and our fear of risks in order to live a balanced life.

Imbalance, often in the form of mental illness, occurs when this balance between these three minds is upset. Either our desire for reward or our fear of loss overwhelms the other, or our executive mind no longer maintains a healthy balance between the two.

In part two of this discussion, I will address how our organizations’ consumption of data to produce the outputs of Discover, Defend, and Decide can become imbalanced and how this imbalance can lead to operational dis-ease, in the form of Data Diabetes.

About the Author

Christopher Surdak is an award-winning, internationally recognized transformation expert. He leverages leading-edge technologies to drive results-oriented digital transformation for organizations of all sizes, industries, and regions. Most recently, he served as the Acting Chief Technology Officer with The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Surdak is the author of the books “The Care and Feeding of BOTS," “Jerk: The Digital Transformation Cookbook,” and “Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Driving New Business Opportunities.”

Surdak holds a Juris Doctor from Taft University, an Executive Masters In Technology Management and a Moore Fellowship from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s Certificate in Information Security from Villanova University, and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.