Value Stream Mapping for Data
How to understand your business as a data person
Make sure you understand the business, no matter your role in the organization. This is a common piece of advice in our field.
Isn’t it obvious, though? Any professional should know this. This is what bothered me more than a decade ago about this advice. Of course, we should understand the business, but how do we actually go about that beyond just talking to people and reading books and blog posts about our industry?
It was not until I read the hugely underrated Practical DataOps book and discovered Value Stream Mapping1 that I obtained a framework for it.
See, the trickiest part of understanding how data is important to our business - especially for large organizations - is that it is literally everywhere. We need some method to reduce the search space. And this is what VSM provides. Let’s have a look:
Any business produces goods and services for a customer. The movement of value can be mapped between the two as a path of transformation with handovers between different business units and summary statistics (such as lead time). From a bird’s eye view, we have three streams: information flow, material flow, and lead time.
The best way to understand what our business is doing is to construct this diagram and map how data relates to each step of every stream. The VSM will look different for each organization (or even product), and you might be more interested in different datasets (with a clear distinction between the operational and analytical already visible). Still, it’s an excellent starting point for getting value out of your data.
This is not to be confused with the Viable System Model, another framework I often advocate for.