Don’t Tell Your Data Team’s ROI Story — Let Others Tell It

If you’re trying to quantify your data team’s impact by yourself, you have already lost. The best ROI story is one that other people tell for you.

The core principle

If your data team is truly providing value, the leaders of other functions should be lining up to sing your song. Limitations or reductions in data team headcount should elicit howls from functional stakeholders.

If your partners aren’t willing to go to bat for you, it’s time to rethink how you’re operating. Are other teams actually benefiting from your work, or are you detached from business outcomes? Is your team in the trenches with other functions, or only providing input from afar?

The Ivory Tower failure mode

Too many data teams operate in a centralized, siloed manner. They may be doing brilliant, insightful work, but they’re too far from the business to make a tangible impact. The gap between “great analysis” and “business value” is bridged by proximity and relationship, not by the quality of the SQL.

The analytical depth trap

As data teams venture into complex work (predictive modeling, statistical analyses, geospatial, ML), they expand into Python, R, notebooks, and SQL IDEs. The data chaos that BI tools were meant to solve resurfaces: analysis in local environments, CSVs emailed back and forth, nobody sure which version is final.

Connects to data team operations, analytics craft, stakeholder management.

Open questions

• How do you build the stakeholder relationships that generate organic advocacy?
• Is there a middle ground between Ivory Tower and fully embedded that preserves analytical independence?