Date Night

For the first decade of my wife and I’s marriage going on a date was ….eh…inconsistent.

Neither of us was opposed to a regular date night. We enjoyed going out together, trying a new restaurant or brewery and just talking. Yet we have three young boys which made the task feel extra complicated.

Two or three (or four) months would go by without an evening out without the kids. My wife would look at me and say “We need a date night”.

So we’d start to think about who we could ask to babysit, when were they available, and how much it would cost.

It wasn’t in the monthly budget, we didn’t have a regular babysitter, and it wasn’t on our calendar so a date night just felt like a huge task to pull off. Consequentially, I’d tend to put it off until my wife said “We need a date night”.

Many companies approach data the same way.

Everything is rolling along with the status quo until an executive says “We need data analytics”. But it’s hard work because there’s no regular budget for this work and no infrastructure or thoughtful designs for building repeatable analytics solutions. The team makes huge efforts to produce a few reports (above and beyond their normal workloads), but then everything goes back to normal.

Until another company leader says “We need data analytics!”

What if instead, you approached data like my wife and I started doing with our date night? For the last 9 months date night is every other Monday night. The babysitter is booked far in advance, and the cost is known and in the budget. The difficult logistics of our date nights have nearly evaporated.

Now we just get to enjoy the results.

And my wife hasn’t once turned to me and said “We need a date night” since.

I’m on your team,

Sawyer

p.s. I help customers turn the dream of “we need data analytics” into a reality. My architecture design and roadmap service is often the first step. Reply to this email to get started.