Purple People within your business may mean life or death

‘Jack of All Trades’ goes from derogatory to compulsory 

The colour purple is formed by mixing red and blue primary colours. The colour purple has been linked to royalty, bravery and strength. Purple was worn by rulers of the Turkish Byzantine and Roman empires. In Japan the colour is traditionally associated with the emperor and the British Crown Jewels are adorned in purple velvet.

In the world of business purple is linked to ‘purple people’ who are professionals who know how to blend business acumen (blue) and technical (red) skills together. These are hybrid professionals who can understand the business, commercial aspects, recognise value, but also be able to understand low level data and technologies.

The concept of ‘purple people’ was formulated by Wayne Eckerson[1], sometime around 2010 when he started to discuss the skills needed for successful business intelligence.

Corporations are full of ‘Red’ functions, departments or individuals – these are the BI technologists, the database administrators, the network engineers. Then of course there is the ‘blue’ function within the corporation, the business divisions, the marketing teams and the finance departments.

In most corporations, these two groups are usually working independently. This perceived unwillingness to cooperate is largely because neither understands the remit, responsibilities, challenges, issues, threats, risks, pressures, deadlines that the other group face.  The other reason is that they speak two different languages; they report to different management, they have different KPI’s, they possess different career aspirations and most likely socialise separately, maybe crossing paths in the office refectory by accident. 

'Purple people’ are neither red or blue. They are not a pure technologist or a specialist, nor are they pure business; they are a balanced blend of both. Anything that requires the practical use, insight and analysis of data requires ‘purple people’ to succeed.

Today, corporations are constantly facing new, transformative and difficult, technical and disruptive business challenges within extensively competitive environments. In order to succeed they need to recruit, train, educate and cultivate more ‘purple people’. 

The migration to new technologies such as robotics, automation, machine learning, cloud,  the volume and diversity of data, big data and analytics to name just a few, all mean the need for the requirement of ‘purple people’.

‘Purple people’ have the knowledge and insight to leverage new and emerging technologies and undertake analytics of data to solve business problems through traditional business skills. These skills can include  collaboration and communication as well as more specific skills such as database management and statistics.

We now live in a world of data, we utilise, collect, store, share, distribute and analyse data in many of our day to day activities. The use of Business Intelligence and Big Data initiatives to monetise or provide intelligence and insight into this data is now commonplace.  Corporations analyse data on their business, within their industry/domain and on their customers to provide additional insight and competitive advantage.

I was introduced to this concept of ‘purple people’ by Horia Senegal, Director of Data Governance at BT and also Bernice DiMarco, Director  of Group Business Assurance, who have recognised the need for ‘purple people’ within their business responsibilities and the broader good of the business. Listening to Horia at a recent Risk & Assurance Group meeting, it is evident that Horia and his colleagues at BT are passionate about the need for ‘purple people’. Horia and his team are working on the ‘coal face’ day to day challenges, dealing with  trying to govern data, manage risk and assurance within a large multi-national telecommunications service provider.

They recognise that to succeed in the domains of Data Governance, Revenue/Business Assurance and Risk Management, they  need to understand the business,  how it functions and its financial and strategic objectives. They also recognise that to be able to do this they need to have full transparency and understanding of the data within the business. They need to understand and have business intelligence. This means there needs to be a coming together of departments, functions and individuals for this to occur. This is where ‘purple people’ come in.

The disciplines of Business Intelligence, Business Assurance, Data Governance requires a thorough and continuous understanding of the business issues, processes and strategies. These business units have the capability of delivering information that answers business questions, as these questions can change from hour by hour, day to day, week to week and are often influenced by the wider market landscape. These teams need to continuously adapt and evolve to succeed and provide business value.  Purple people can continually reconcile, mediate, educate, negotiate,  communicate between business and IT domains and build a strong  lasting partnership that delivers real value.

Eric Priezkalns, CEO of the Risk & Assurance Group recently presented a similar concept at the recent Risk & Assurance event in Bahrain, where he discussed the need for ‘RiskJacks’ to ensure successful management moving forward in the telecommunications industry – a combination of an engineer, consultant, data scientist and investigator. Not going too deep into Etymology, a ‘RiskJack’ is a progression from ‘SteepleJack’ or ‘LumberJack’ and what was a somewhat derogatory phrase in the past of ‘Jack of all Trades’: a person not skilled in one specific job, but who dabbled in many. 

Be it ‘‘Purple People’ or ‘RiskJacks’, the need to be multi-skilled and multi-domain proficient is a now a necessity in the explosive and transformational Data Economy we now reside.

[1] Wayne Eckerson: is a thought leader in the business intelligence and analytics field since the early 1990s. He has conducted many research studies and written books: The Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders and Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. For many years, he served as director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute, where he oversaw the company's research and training programs and chaired its BI Executive Summit. He also served previously as an industry analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group. He is an industry analyst at TechTarget and principal consultant of Eckerson Group.