Data. Keep It Simple. Keep It Yours.

A Note Before You Start Working With Your Data

We could have made the Human First Handbook much cleverer.

We could have built forms for you to complete, databases to store your answers, dashboards to display them and automated tools to tell you what we’d found. We haven’t. Partly because we don’t need to own your data in order to help you understand it and partly because sometimes the simplest tool is the best place to think.

Start With A Pen, Not A Platform

As you work through the Handbook, you’ll start uncovering information about how your business actually works.

What systems do you use? Who has access to them? Where does customer information go? Which suppliers hold things on your behalf? Who knows how everything works? What happens when someone leaves?

It’s tempting to immediately find a tool to organise all of this.

Don’t. At least, not yet.

Get some paper. Find a whiteboard. Stick Post-it notes to a wall. Draw arrows. Cross things out. Move things around. Have the conversation with the people who actually do the work.

Thinking doesn’t have to start digitally just because the subject is digital.

Why We Haven’t Given You A Form

A form decides the structure before you’ve discovered the answerSometimes that’s useful. Sometimes it means you spend more time trying to make your business fit the form than understanding what’s actually happening. The same is true of planning software.

A new tool can give you somewhere beautifully organised to record your complexity while quietly adding another system to the complexity you’re trying to understand. There is a certain irony in buying another platform to catalogue the fact that you have too many platforms.

So the Handbook gives you questions rather than somewhere to put the answers.

Work It Out First. Structure It Afterwards.

Once you’ve explored something and understand what information matters, then create the digital asset.

Often, a spreadsheet will be perfectly adequate.

For example, if you’re mapping the systems your business uses, you might eventually create a spreadsheet containing:

• System Or Tool

• What We Use It For

• What Information It Holds

• Who Uses It

• Who Owns The Account

• Who Has Administrator Access

• Which Supplier Provides It

• What It Costs

• When It Renews

• What It Connects To

• What Would Happen If We Lost Access

• Questions We Still Need To Answer

That spreadsheet is now useful because you designed it around what your business actually needs to know.

Later, if the spreadsheet becomes too cumbersome, you have evidence for choosing something more sophisticated.

That’s very different from starting with the sophisticated thing and then trying to work out how your business fits inside it.

Simple Tools Don’t Necessarily Mean Simple Work

Watch people who are very good at analysing complicated things and you’ll often find surprisingly ordinary tools on the table.

• Paper

• Whiteboards

• Spreadsheets

• Documents

They don’t necessarily reach for another platform every time the problem becomes more complicated.

Instead, they use increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking with simple tools.

• A spreadsheet can start as a list

• Then you can sort it

• Filter it

• Categorise it

• Compare things

• Add dates

• Identify duplicates

• Find gaps

• Create relationships

• Eventually you may discover that you’ve reached the limits of the tool

Excellent. Now you know why you need something else.

Your Data Should Belong To You

There’s another reason we’ve deliberately kept the Handbook this way.

As you work through it, you may uncover genuinely important information about your business.

Systems. Suppliers. People. Processes. Costs. Customers. Dependencies. Risks. Access. Ownership.

We don’t need a copy of all of thatData ownership is part of digital ownership.

Wherever practical, we want you to build useful information assets that your business owns, understands and can take with it.

That means thinking about:

• What Information You Collect

• Why You Collect It

• Where You Keep It

• Who Can Access It

• Who Controls It

• Who Else Has A Copy

• How You Would Retrieve It

• What Would Happen If A Supplier Disappeared

• Whether You Could Move It Somewhere Else

We’ll come back to these questions as we look more closely at data.

Don’t Digitise The Mess

There’s a wider Human First principle underneath all of this: Understand first. Structure second. Digitise third. Automate last.

If something is confused on a whiteboard, putting it into software doesn’t necessarily make it less confused.

And if you don’t yet understand what information matters, collecting more of it doesn’t necessarily make you better informed.

• Use the Handbook to think

• Use paper and whiteboards to explore

• Use simple digital tools to create assets your business can keep

Then add complexity only when you understand what that complexity is going to do for you.

The clever bit isn’t the tool. It’s knowing what you’re trying to achieve with it.