The Story

There is a conversation happening at board level in most organisations right now about AI, data-driven decision-making and the strategic value of information. It is a real conversation and largely a correct one. It is also, at the very start of some pipelines, a person attaching a zipped spreadsheet to an email. That is the bitter truth in a number of markets. Third-party providers who have little reason to care about data quality, sending reports manually, changing the structure without prior notice or documentation, with the only available contacts working in the local language alone. None of this is negligence. Data is not their job, and the report is a favour appended to their real work. The temptation is to treat these sources as an embarrassment — something to hide from the roadmap discussion, or to force out of existence on a timeline that suits the strategy rather than the market. I have found it more honest and more effective to treat them as a condition to be supported properly: maintain the ageing protocols, absorb the manual handling, and keep the simple thing running reliably. It costs effort that could have gone to newer capability, and that cost is real. The point of saying this is not to dwell on how difficult it is. It is that a clear-eyed understanding of what actually happens on the ground is part of the job. A leader defending an AI roadmap in a board meeting, who has forgotten how the data physically arrives, is defending something that cannot be delivered.

These are the problems I find worth the effort: unglamorous, constrained, and consequential. If you have one like it, I would like to hear about it.

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