Data informed, not data driven
Why I pushed the business toward being data informed — pairing data with judgment, context, and experience — instead of blindly data driven.
Everyone used to talk about being “data driven.”
I realized that was misleading.
The goal wasn’t for the business units to be data driven. That would have implied everyone could perfectly interpret data and always knew when to trust it or override it with judgment. High bar. Risky.
Instead, we focused on helping them be data informed. Data guided decisions: trends, anomalies, hypotheses. But insight alone wasn’t enough. The right decisions came from combining data with judgment, context, and experience.
We approached data governance in an agile manner: starting small with the most critical data assets, improving them iteratively, and expanding over time. Layering in analysis and storytelling turned raw data into actionable insight — real decision science.
Being data informed helped the business units make confident, well-grounded decisions. Blindly data driven? That would have meant ignoring all our business acumen and judgment.