The 00001010 Commandments of Data

Jackson, Wyoming (updated January 2025)

When I coached my daughter’s softball team years ago, I had the brilliant idea to recruit the fastest athlete at the school and put her in the game when a slow player got on first base. But in her first game, she ran directly from first base to third base, skipping second base altogether. She didn’t understand even the most basic rule of the game: you must touch all the bases before you can score.

Sometimes, you need to start with the basics.

Starting at the Beginning

A frictionless data strategy starts with good data and ends with good decisions. But many companies go straight to creating metrics, just like that softball player thinking she could skip a few bases on her way to scoring. That’s why I’ve put together this simple list of rules: to help you start in the right place and stay on track. I plan to write about each rule in a series of upcoming articles.

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Zane’s 00001010 Commandments of Data Strategy

1. Never mask bad data with logic (always fix data at the source).

2. Never give access to raw data.

3. Never use reports to manage business logic.

4. Always define the system of record.

5. Never break the link between the business activity and the metrics.

6. Always measure the whole before measuring the parts.

7. Always warehouse the data first.

8. Always store data as journals.

9. Always enforce cell-level security.

10. Always use hierarchies to align business definitions.

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Don’t worry if some of these rules don’t make sense to you right now. Instead, use them to help with everyday decisions. For example, if IT replies to your request by creating a new report, you might want to discuss the Fourth Commandment with them. If you’re an IT person responding to a request to clean up some bad data with more report logic, you might want to discuss the First Commandment with the people who asked you to do it.

Rules Alone Won’t Save You or Your Organization

IT people (like me) love following rules. We measure success by “the Five 9s”, meaning the systems we support should stay up and running 99.999% of the time. The more closely you stick to the rules, the better your chances of achieving the Five 9s. IT theorists even figured out how to standardize people. They view people as “personas”, meaning that they think of a typical user and create rules for how that user should do their work.

You need to understand the rules of managing data, but that’s just the starting point. Using decision data is more like shaping pottery out of clay than assembling furniture from IKEA. Nobody starts their pottery project with the same lump of clay. Your data reflects everything that’s unique about your company; people spin it, stretch it, and mold it into new shapes every day. There’s nothing boilerplate about it.

You’ll be amazed how often companies (maybe even your own) break every rule I listed.

But learning the rules won’t make you a “natural” at using data. Shohei just had the best single-game performance of all time (see video below). He knows what to do in any situation, without even thinking about it. But even Ohtani started by learning the rules of the game.

Just following these rules will never make you the Shohei Ohtani of data. The whole point is to help you begin to understand purpose behind each rule. Rules alone can never deliver the strategic outcomes you’re looking for, but they can help you avoid obvious mistakes.