A metric without an owner is just a number

This autumn I am teaching Data-Informed Organisations at Hyper Island. Four weeks, real client briefs, and one distinction underneath all of it. Data-driven means the number decides. Data-informed means a person decides, with the number in hand, and owns what happens next.

The students are not assessed on their analysis. They are assessed on whether they can land a recommendation a business can act on, and hold it when someone pushes back.

I bring my own client work into that room every week. But governance is Karima Makrof's specialty, not mine, and there is a point where students should hear it from the person who has spent a career inside it. So this week I brought her in. Karima is the founder and CEO of AKLYON Consulting, and describes her work as helping organisations move from data chaos to confident decisions. That is this course in six words.

She took on one question: where does it actually break? Then she drew the chain we all work inside: question, data, insight, recommendation, decision, action, outcome.

Almost all of our effort goes into the first five steps. The value only appears in the last two. You can run a flawless analysis, write a sharp recommendation, get the decision signed off, and still change nothing at all if no one acts.

Three things she said, as I wrote them down, that I want my students to carry with them. “Ask questions. Figure things out. Nobody is going to hand you the information.” “Being responsible for something and being accountable for it are not the same thing.” And: “A metric without an owner is just a number. A dashboard without a decision behind it is just a beautiful collection of data.”

That last one is the whole course in two sentences. Frameworks give students a language. Practitioners give them judgement. One practitioner is never enough.