Author: Nick Ismail / Source: Information Age
There are many qualities that we search for in great leaders: wisdom; loyalty; constancy; courage; the ability to communicate persuasively, balanced with a willingness to hear uncomfortable truths and to change direction. But when it comes to a great data leader, a crucial role in an increasingly digitalised era, the defining characteristics vary slightly. Let’s explore what they are:
Ability to embrace change
To work in Information Technology in the early 21st century is to live in an era of unprecedented – and accelerating – change. New technologies are proliferating at such speed that even domain experts are struggling to keep up with new logos that appear in presentations summarising recent arrivals.
Furthermore, more data than ever before is available to support analysis, and in greater variety. Established methods for functions such as software development, information management and governance and the design and development of architecture and infrastructure are cracking under the twin pressures of the “new” and the requirement to do more, more quickly, with the same or fewer resources. It’s clear that these are challenging, but also exciting times for data leaders.
Little over two decades ago, the industry regarded business processes as ever-changing, but data structures as largely constant and stable. Businesses believed that if they modelled their data correctly and exhaustively, they would be largely insulated from changes in the world around…
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