Data As...?

Most of us would answer the above question with "asset" or "product", but how many of us have ever seen a believable accounting of the results of our hours of working delivering projects, programs, and - now - products?

My guess is damn few.

I have been mulling over a series of articles with the "Data As…" prefix.  I already published Data As a Byproduct, and was drafting entries for Data As Inventory, Data As Product, yada, yada, yada.  But it wasn't really landing for me.

So, I decided to take a road trip across the Ohio border one morning in the hopes that the leisurely trip through the tri-state Ohio River Valley vistas would bring inspiration.

It was only a few minutes into my return trip, my various tanks recently filled or emptied, when two key truths slammed to the forefront of my thinking:

1. Data Is Currency - the original digital business asset is any general ledger output from ANY accounting system currently in use in modern business.  Everything from QuickBooks to Workday.
2. Data Is a Line of Business - before it can be rightly called either an asset or a product - and evaluated for its contribution to the bottom line - it MUST stop being treated as administrative overhead.

My secret CFO taught me about the accounting equation.  If you're not an accountant - like me - you might be tempted to ask, "which equation?".  To which my CFO would say, "THE equation."  Apparently, everything else the accounting world I've interacted with over the course of my career is built on that foundation.  It's the basis for double-entry bookkeeping and ensures that a company's financial statements are properly balanced and WON'T cause the Treasury Department to come after you.

My secret CTO and I are talking about building agents that will generate insight on the value of any data spend, and other agents that will potentially automate key aspects of making data AI-ready in threads concurrent with raw ingestion.  Review-ready data profiles, pipeline models, target mapping any source into common domain models can all be done in the fraction of the time using AI.  The amount of time wasted on administrivia in the current corporate and consulting paradigm can but slashed dramatically without sucking the lifeforce out of every analyst, engineer, and product manager on your payroll.

Tired of putting lipstick on the same old pig, year after year?  Tired of feeling like your data programs are nothing more than runaway money pits?  Ready for real value and execution instead of the same old wandering in the desert and never getting to the promised land?

Then we should talk.  Click here for a free 30-minute consultation.