Data Governance

This might be a bit of a stretch. But stick with me. When my daughter was young, she was very impatient. No idea where she gets it from. Anyway, after a bath, she'd always get dressed without drying herself properly. This led to 'the parable of the wet sock'. Firstly, she had to find the sock. It would often be in the wrong drawer. And it would never be attached to a matched item. After time spent assembling a pair, dragging a once dry sock over a wet foot was a study in frustration. And a sure way to early sock destruction. Completing [...]

A couple of weeks ago Nicola Askham and I posed a question on LinkedIn: "What are the most common Data Myths you hear?'. 6000+ views and a hundred odd comments later suggests this is something worth investigating further. While it felt a bit like group therapy, there is a serious side to myths around data. Firstly they exist- that's a problem because they often confuse or obfuscate the narrative that data really is an organisational wide asset, and must be managed as such. Secondly, they endure- so even the most compelling or nuanced arguments are blocked by a unshiftable ideology around [...]

What are data sharing agreements and where do they fit in a Data Governance framework? On first analysis, it’s not obvious that they do! However, they are relevant when we consider the scope of that framework. The production, manipulation and use of data outside of our organisations are often forgotten when considering data quality. We focus on internal ingress points which are mostly controlled through our own stewards and producers. This can be a dangerous assumption as external data is far more common than we might think. It fits into two distinct areas: Additional data sets. These are often paid-for datasets which augment [...]

Who are the DGN and why are we running an assessment. The Data Governance Network (DGN) is made up of practitioners from over 30 UK universities. It is primarily a support network to develop and share good practice in relation to data management and governance for the HE sector. It has become clear that in order to provide this support we need to understand where the sector currently is in terms of its capabilities around the management and governance of data. By understanding this we can target the development of tools, techniques and associated guidance to increase our mutual data capability [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]