Data Disorder Defined:

Many senior leadership and management teams suffer from a new disease called “Data
Disorder”. Data disorder is not the lack of data, but the overwhelming amount of data we are
inundated with every day. In today’s digital environment senior leaders are subjected to
streams of data from many sources in both their professional and personal lives. And the
blur between the two becomes increasingly hard to manage as the devices we carry with us
every day are multitasking both sides of our lives every minute, in the palm of our hands or
on laptops. Email accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, subscriptions of all
kinds, and other forms of social media along with many others.

What Happens in Real Life:

This overwhelming, excessive amount of data, can be just as debilitating as too little
information. An unfortunate example of this was the informational disorganization of the
intelligence and first responder communities during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to
the commission that studied the attacks there was an abundance of information, but it
wasn’t shared amongst all the agencies. Analysis wasn’t pooled across individuals and
groups. Handoffs of information between senior teams was missed and therefore effective,
preemptive, operations could not be launched.

“From details of this case” the commission wrote, “one can see how hard it is for the
intelligence community to assemble the right pieces of the puzzle or to make sense of
them”. Although not nearly as dramatic as this example, executives at all levels are
drowning in disparate, unorganized streams of information and data that don’t fit into the
puzzle. It used to be hard to get the data, now it’s impossible to know which data to use,
where it’s all stored, how to apply it properly or what's to be done with it. Never has it been
truer, that a “data dump” would be exactly that - a dump.

The Problem at Hand:

This is very evident in todays' current working environment. Decentralization of information
services has fostered the proliferation of different data processing programs across many
parts of the organization. From division to division, team to team or even within a team
itself, over time. A problem that is compounded daily by mergers and acquisitions or simply
through attrition, with employees coming and going throughout the organization and
keeping data to themselves on their laptops or on personal hard drives. Or worse yet, it all
gets stored on "the cloud” somewhere, and it’s impossible to wade your way through it. In
addition, and more often than not, through M&A's or combining of divisions, the formally
independent entities rely on hardware or software that differ in fundamental ways from each
other. From dashboards, to data delivery, down to the code itself. With no one in the
organization having the secret decoder ring anymore!

Data disorder then takes on many forms that become increasingly hard to cure. Since we
are overwhelmed with the data, we attempt to decipher what’s useful and what’s not on our
own. And given the complexity and cost associated with it deciphering it, sometimes we end
up scraping it all together. Thus, relying on anecdotal data gathered the old fashion way -
asking questions, sharing of white papers, individual internet research and water cooler
conversations, instead of systematic business intelligence.

Conclusion:
Why is this important? In today’s business arena, traditional measurements of success no
longer hold up. And the reasons are all digital – the devices executives use in their lives, the
paths they take towards data acquisition and purchase intent, where and how the data is
stored and their engagement with disruptive unsynchronized data streams, make defining
the data journey all that much more difficult.

The challenge is clear: the game is no longer the same. And winning it requires using
different muscles, developing a different set of strengths both internally and from trusted
partners.