We’ve all heard of companies who are more internally focused than externally focused. It’s been one of the barriers to successful customer-focused initiatives, the fact that people can’t get out of their own way and support change for the customer’s sake. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers say in their latest book, Return on Customer, without customers we don’t have a business. More companies’ behaviors should reflect this philosophy.

The phenomenon of internal focus is usually painted with the broad brush of politics. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and I’ve decided that there’s a “gestalt” behind such cultures. What I mean is, when it comes to internally-focused organizations, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Simply put, an internally-focused company is comprised of internally focused people. You might even know some of them. I do. They concentrate on managing perception rather than on their job responsibilities. They spend more time on relationship building than they do on delivery. They’re all about domain ownership (aka: what’s mine, what’s not).

Just when I start sounding jaded about this stuff—I know when this happens because I start talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of need until someone smacks me upside the head with sociology textbook—something interesting happens. I have a conversation with a well-meaning executive that knocks me sideways and gives me new hope for corporate America.

For instance, last Monday I was meeting with a Vice President of Strategy for an entertainment company in L.A. His company’s IT department had asked me to come in and introduce the topic of data-as-an asset. They wanted me to cover why data quality and integration can be mapped back to customer-focused strategy. I did 90-minute presentation to the V.P. and his team. Mindful of their attention span and busy schedules—these were, after all, business people—I didn’t focus on customer data management processes and technologies, but on the opportunity cost of not doing customer data management.

The post-meeting Q and A was over lunch across the street from the studio. The strategy exec was engaged and frank. He said:

"I’ll be the first to admit I don’t get this stuff. I don’t really want to get it. But if it’s the right thing to do for the firm, I’ll put up my budget. I mean, I believe you…I just can’t wrap my brain around what this will take. But get me a list of benefits. Tell me what we can’t do as a company until we get this right. Give me a roadmap. And if you can do those things, I’ll fund it."

I mean, I liked the guy before he said this stuff, but now I’d move his fridge for him. For an executive whose time is normally consumed meeting with large consulting firms who don’t name names (McKinsey), he was willing sit down with a data integration and BI services firm (Baseline) and discuss the business risks of not having good data (counterproductive interactions with suppliers, contradictory communications to retailing partners, sub-optimal marketing campaigns, just to name a few).

At the end of lunch, he’d committed to bankrolling an initial data quality effort and—God bless him—justifying the expense to his colleagues in upper management.

Who knows? He could end up falling on his sword. But I doubt he will. Because someone who commits to improving corporate data in a sustained an ongoing way has probably already built some political muscle and doesn’t feel the need to constantly flex it via perception management and spin. Instead, he can think about what’s best for his firm.

My friends Brett and Pam made a movie. The movie is called My Date with Drew, and it’s about a guy who’s had a crush on Drew Barrymore since he was a little kid and how he has thirty days to get a date with her. It’s a great “concept,” as they say in Hollywood.

I attended a premier of the movie last year and pronounced it the “sleeper hit” of the summer box office and heartily congratulated Brett and Pam, and their producer, Andy, for making a really sweet-but-not-cloying film.

But My Date with Drew, per the popular Hollywood vernacular, didn’t have legs. It was a box office flop. While those involved all have their theories about why, my take on it was that the distributors didn’t have the patience to market the movie in a way that would generate lasting buzz. There were a few radio plugs, but otherwise everyone was counting on word-of-mouth. The buzz never spread.

This sort of reminds me of data quality efforts. (I know. It seems like a stretch right now, but bear with me.) Lots of them launch with enthusiasm, optimism, and scads of goodwill. The assumption is: As soon as a few people see the value of all this great data, everyone will jump on the bandwagon! It’s sort of the “If you build it, they will come” of data management. But most of the time, if you build it and don’t generate the requisite buzz, they won’t even know.

Data quality efforts often start with data audits or assessments, and the good ones define data and business rules that make their way into production systems and analytical applications. But, devoid the ongoing enrichment of the data via additional data and ongoing cleansing and refinement, data quality initiatives quickly lose their luster. Some of them—to use another Hollywood metaphor—go straight to video.

It’s important to socialize data enrichment as a must-do, and keep at it. In fact, it’s important to generate buzz for all data quality efforts, including assessments, audits, and business user data acceptance. You might only get one shot.

Oh, and My Date With Drew is out on DVD. I heartily recommend renting it!

You have to start managing data as a corporate asset.

Doesn’t that sound like so much finger-wagging by pedantic-sounding industry gurus and consultants? I’ve been telling clients and audiences to manage their data as an asset for over three years now. It sounds great. But no one—including a lot of the gurus busy admonishing their constituencies—really knows what it means.

I like to tell the story of a CIO who, when asked whether her company was managing data as an asset, shook her head up and down so fervently she looked like a bobblehead. “Yes, we are!” she insisted. I then asked her whether she was investing in data proportionally to her other corporate assets.

Suddenly her office was so quiet we could hear the hum of the Data General MV/8000 systems in the computer room downstairs.

To understand what it means to manage data as an asset, you first have to understand the business definition of the term “asset.” An asset:

 Is something that has value. For instance, a company’s inventory has value.
 Is something whose value can be measured. For instance, a company’s fleet of vehicles has quantifiable value on its own. Furthermore, the cost of the fleet not being operational is also measure-able.
 Helps a company achieve its strategic objectives.

When managed the right way—that is, as an asset—a company’s data meets all three of the above criteria.

Obviously, you can’t just flip a switch and start managing data as an asset. There are processes, skills, and technologies that should be brought to bear on corporate data. It’s called data asset management, and the acronym itself appropriately echoes the expletive your business executive utters when he realizes that—like other corporate assets—you have to invest in data to realize its true potential.

But like other corporate assets data is worth the investment.