Managing your business requires data, mind and heart

We’ve been inundated for years with reports and analysis about how important data is in running a business and that organizations, large and small, should strive to become “data-driven.” Companies have responded in kind, allocating substantial resources to design an enterprise and supporting architecture that can capture and leverage data, insights, intelligence and knowledge. This data pours into a business from numerous sources: customers, financial records, documents, social media, websites and much more.

Should a company make all of its important decisions solely on data? Or is more required in formulating your strategic business plan, implementing your corporate vision and answering challenging questions that you face on a daily basis?

Heine Krog Iversen, CEO of TimeXtender, believes data is only part of the equation. In this exclusive interview, he discusses the notion of running an organization and making important business decisions not only with data, but also with your mind and heart. 

As a CEO of a company that helps businesses make faster, better business decisions with a modern data estate, what convinced you that decision-making should be enhanced with mind and heart?

How can decision-making not include mind and heart? When we look at data, we have to understand that data is put into a data warehouse so that we can analyze it. This data is by nature “historical.” The data tells us what happened in the past. It tells you what happened last week or last quarter or last year, but it doesn’t tell you the reason it happened. Don’t get me wrong, these numbers are extremely important, but data doesn’t remember what we actually did or how we got there. The data implies that we have no mind or no heart involved, which, of course, is not the case.

A lot of people talk about using data for predictions only by looking at historical data to predict future data values. This, too, implies that we have no mind or no heart involved. It’s frankly a waste of time if you only look at historical data that is generated in a universe based on a set of assumptions and constraints like company, competition, region or time period and try to model that to predict the future. In any business strategy, you use your mind to lay out vision, plans and ways to improve every day. You use your mind for R&D, to buy and sell a company and to build new products.

With a new strategy, such as a new go-to-market product strategy, how do you expect that the “old” number can tell us what the future holds for the “new” product? This historical data cannot tell us how much we will sell of a brand new product in a brand new market. The numbers are extremely important, but we have to be sure to recognize that all this data has helped us move the company forward but only to this point. The historical number cannot help us refocus or try something else. We have to measure where we are today versus where we were yesterday. My old historical data has value but when we are looking into something such as a new wave of marketing or modern revelations, all the data that we have may not be suitable for this new wave. History is not really good for positioning. 

Can you tell us more about using your heart?

Every company and its management team has heart. Most companies have something that they believe in, for example, the way they treat people or the way they view customers. Along with using your mind and all the information that is available, why do some companies with the same data do better than others? I think it’s heart. It’s passion. The belief to take a risk. Having the heart to put customers’ interests first. We have to make it easy for the customer. This comes from heart. Business models are easy to copy but the important question is: Do you have heart?

A great example is the development of a new class of automobiles – the electric car. Heart can help you rise up and keep going in spite of uphill battles, challenges, downturns and obstacles. The only way I can get people to buy something new is if I believe wholeheartedly in it myself with passion and heart. Heart is what you believe in. Data alone could tell you there’s no business case for a new situation that has never existed, so there is no predicted market.

To do some heavy risk-taking you need data, mind and heart. You need to vision it in your mind. Heart is when you say to yourself: “I truly believe this is where the world needs to go.” With heart, whatever happens, failure is not an option. The only thing to keep you going is your heart.

Do you recommend using data, mind and heart for getting a look at the current status of a company, as well as for predictive and prescriptive analysis?

I think we need to step back from using data alone for predictions and allowing it to dominate our thinking for determining action. We understand that you have to make decisions and back them up with data or use your data to help you get a better understanding of the market, competition and what is involved. This is a given. However, you can’t let the data dominate what you do. You have to have a strategy and a plan. It all starts with the strategy and with the mind to help develop the strategy and with the heart to feel the passion behind the vision. The data can support this effort but it’s not the exclusive ruling principle for building a business.

When you talk about data, mind and heart, do you mean business users of data or also for more technical professionals such as BI analysts or data scientists?

It depends. Of course, for business end-users making decisions yes, but even with that it depends on the business user’s role. The user needs to understand how the business flows and what their use case is, and that really depends on their functional role in the company. For instance, accounting has different needs than marketing. Some roles require more mind and some more heart. For technical professionals it depends as well. If they are assigned a particular responsibility, they might be required to just merely look at the numbers and generate a report of the data. This would require very little heart.

Donald Farmer, principal at TreeHive Strategy, talks about technical and IT professionals going from being gatekeepers of data to shopkeepers. If you are a gatekeeper, you would do the job you were directed to do without having a larger perspective on why. The gatekeeper works to give the business user or BI analyst as little data as possible – only what they need to generate the report or dashboard they are building. This limits the perspective of the business user and may lead to excluding valuable data from analysis. The shopkeeper sees themselves as enablers of data use – offering business users additional data that can impact analysis and decision-making.

Most companies are not advanced enough to monitor the smaller items being done on a daily basis that need to be watched and improved. Generally, this activity is the best use case for data. BI analysts should understand what it is that the company wants to measure, and a great use for the BI analysts is to also use some mind and heart as they understand the business. This is where the strategy, data, mind and heart come into play together as there are so many data points with more and more pouring in faster and faster – data such as social media, streaming and IoT. Managing and prioritizing all this data comes from having a mindset to pinpoint data needs. The BI analysts can try to understand what kind of data should be used and then focus on that information.

Note: Look for part two of the interview in the coming weeks as Heine discusses more about the reasoning behind using data, mind and heart to make sound business decisions.

Heine Krog Iversen is the founder and CEO of TimeXtender. Since founding the company in 2006, he has been the chief executive responsible for transforming TimeXtender from a small startup to one of the fastest growing software companies in the world with 3,300 customers across 95 countries. Heine is driven by one core purpose: to empower every person in every organization with instant access to data, for any use case they might have.