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Data Driven decisions in a changing world – Webinar 16th July.
I'm co-hosting a one hour webinar with my friends and colleagues from Waterstons It's based on feedback from our clients on gaining clarity on what to measure, and how to make best use of the outputs of those measurements. Sign up here: https://www.waterstons.com/events/data-driven-decision-making-in-unprecedented-times A litte more context below. Universities are an eclectic mix of cutting-edge research, world changing-innovation and centuries old tradition. Ultra-modern, glass-plated campuses can mask communities that are slow to embrace change. “We’ve always done it like that” and “we tried that in the last transformation programme and it didn’t work” echoes down corridors while world class scientists recreate [...]
The perils of “Swivel Chair Integration”
Any data professional should be a clear advocate of implementing good data management and governance. Like many apparently self-evident statements, this is not quite as simple as it seems. Consider data quality. The go-to best practice approach is 'Clean at the point of capture'. Which is absolutely best practice if you have first understood why you need to capture that data, whether you have the right source or have already captured it elsewhere, what the full range of use cases are and how quality tolerances will be calculated and measured. This is still less than half the job done though. And that's [...]
Data Governance is not Data Science
Data Governance is not Data Science. Which is a shame because it is the latter that excites the senior leadership of most organisations I work with. This is understandable as these individuals are interested in high quality information which informs the decisions and actions they are making on a daily basis. Much of this information is purportedly an output of Data Science. What is less understandable is how the good management and governance of data is somehow divorced from the use of it. This is not a new problem; in the last ten years ‘Data Science’ could be replaced by ‘Analytics’, [...]
Working in the ‘New Normal’
Testing out the whiteboard. Optional Labrador available for all remote workshops! Let’s start by saying there are far more important things going on in the world right now. We’re in uncharted territory with the concept of being on a ‘war footing’ not seeming too far-fetched. The efforts being made by our healthcare, retail, logistics and so many other sectors renders what we do significantly less important. Although how data is being used in this crisis is fascinating. We’ll be back to that in a later post. Our approach has been to control only what we can control and not [...]
The DQ issue log – a visualisation approach
The Data Quality Issue Log (DQIL) is a central tenet of any sustainable data governance framework. It is the central repository for the entire organisations data issues, themed by urgency, priority and business alignment. It drives activity for the Data Stewards and acts as a point of accountability for the Data Owners. So why does nobody to care about it then? Mostly because it’s hard to link 500+ issues to something that feels tangible and important. The problem with a DQIL is it is a repository not a source of management information. It is a passive receiver of issues. We want to [...]
Data Owners: first item on their agenda
Once we've identified, allocated and trained our Data Owners then we're done, right? Wrong! This is exactly the time we need to be mentoring that group as their role is not entirely intuitive. Why is that? Well Data Owners should be members of your organisations senior leadership team with functional accountability for a domain. That's a great start, but their data governance role extends beyond that and across the organisation. Inhabiting the owner role may deliver a dis-benefit to their own functional area. That's a whole other post, but today I'm focussing on their other primary responsibility: empowering their stewards. The question [...]
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