How Organizations Struggle with Data Fluency - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 37

development and coined Conway's Law. You've experienced this problem if
you've ever been on a customer service call where you give all your personal
information at the start of the call and then have to give it all again every time
you're transferred.
Although Conway's Law was partly meant in jest, it's an accurate sociological
observation that has been confirmed in studies. Communication is hard and
people with different motivations and backgrounds will create a fractured
design.
A similar challenge applies to data. Each organizational department may use
different data systems and terminology, processes, and conventions in data
conversations and products.
We recently experienced this in a large urban school district. The Office of
Assessment and Accountability (OAA) is a data-lover's paradise, with the latest
technologies, a team of skilled data scientists, and an effective data warehouse
beloved by principals and teachers alike.
Balkanized data and the data fluency fRamewoRk
If you don't have a shared data culture and ecosystem, your data will be siloed.
This limits what you can learn and the questions you can ask. The solution
isn't purely technical, it's organizational. Chapter 6, “The Data Fluent Culture,”
and Chapter 7, “The Data Product Ecosystem,” discuss how organizations can
break down these silos to create a more data fluent organization.
However, policy changes were encouraging school leaders to think about
teacher quality and performance alongside the more traditional measures
of student achievement. With this in mind, members of the OAA began to