Paul Morley: Putting People at the Center of Your Data Strategy

Nedbank Executive, Group Data Services Paul Morley shares his
experiences of building company-wide data communities and how he
believes organizations can benefit from them

For companies to truly embrace data and analytics, data leaders
need to move conversations around data literacy beyond their
departments and into the broader organization.


For Paul Morley, Executive, Group Data Services at South African
bank Nedbank, one of the best ways to build data literate
organizations is to make data conversations a part of daily
business operations.


In this week’s Business of Data podcast episode, he shares his
experiences around building organization-wide data communities
and how companies can benefit from them.


“I focus a lot on internal education and collaboration to build
awareness and create enthusiasm around data,” Morley says. “I
probably spend about two or three hours a day doing just that.”


“If I could do more, I would,” he adds. “It's very important to
make people who don't understand data understand it because, for
an organization, working with data is like a team sport. As much
as we might naturally want to focus on just the data team, it’s
actually not about us. It’s about taking the whole company with
you and inculcating that knowledge.”
Three Tips for Promoting Data Literacy

Gartner’s 2020 Execution Gap Survey found that 67% of employees
don’t understand their role when new growth initiatives are
rolled out. To address this challenge and drive the value of data
literacy all the way to the grassroots, Morley recommends the
following:



Embrace repetition. The only way to instill a
data literate business culture is repetition, repetition,
repetition. It’s like playing a new sport, Morley says. It
takes practice to get good at it


Appoint the right leaders. Morley says it’s
important for data leaders to cultivate good communication
skills. He attributes his own success in part to his natural
extroversion, and recommends building teams full of leaders who
are strong communicators


Get down in the trenches. Morley encourages
data leaders to spend more time talking to the people at the
coalface than sitting in leadership strategy sessions. If
frontline staff don’t buy into the journey, you’re going to
fail. With them on-side, you’ll have a better chance of
enacting the change you’d like to see

Be Mindful of the Headhunter Threat

Building a strong internal data community may be about more than
those working directly with data. But the challenge of finding
and retaining staff with the right skills persists. Talent
poaching remains a reality for many companies.


Morley explains: “Two other local banks are actively hunting our
employees. We’ve lost about 30% of our staff this year alone in
our group, across professions. It is concerning and it’s
something we’re discussing at the executive level. But we’re also
still attracting a lot of new blood; that’s testament to
Nedbank’s culture.”


Seeing off this threat is about making your company as attractive
a place to work as possible. Morley says providing opportunities
for training and personal development has a role to play, here