Read part 1: Different departments, different numbers?
You invest in a central data platform, build clean dashboards, and yet after a few months everyone reaches for their own Excel again. Sounds familiar? The problem is rarely technical, it’s a matter of business involvement.
Many organizations launch a new report or platform with great enthusiasm. It gets viewed for the first few weeks, then usage fades. Teams cannot find their numbers the way they know them, miss that one KPI, and fall back on their trusted spreadsheets.
When a platform is built entirely top-down or purely from IT, it rarely matches the day-to-day reality of the departments. Definitions are slightly off, reports answer the wrong questions, and trust stays low. The result is a technically correct platform that hardly gets used in practice.
A data platform only becomes valuable when the business co-owns it. The approach that works best for us is to appoint a Subject Matter Expert (SME) per department.
That keeps reports relevant and supported. The business helps decide what gets measured and recognizes itself in the numbers. That is the difference between a platform that goes unused and one every department relies on daily.
A data platform is only worth as much as its adoption. Give the business ownership, and your data becomes relevant, accurate and actually used.
This is blunder 2 of 4. Want all three blunders, including insights and solutions? Download the full longread.