What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization and on the industry as a whole?
Excellence in data management in its broadest sense is still my top priority as it is the foundation that will let us use the data we collect, store and share with integrity, trust and accountability. It ranges from strong data governance foundations through to how to ethically manage data and everything in between such as data quality management, data management technology and operations, authoritative sources and data safety to ensure that data is available, accessible and appropriate (’AAA Data’) for the needs of the business. Companies need to push for and design more creative ways to embed the disciplines of data management into the way they work in order to have ’AAA Data’. This will let them take better and faster advantage of the extraordinary technologies that continue to evolve in AI and ML for their algorithms, model development, insights and product development. Embedding the disciplines of data management must be tightly coupled with solving real business problems that negatively impact operations, business processes, customer experience and competitive position.
Organizations that can effectively manage and leverage their data will have a competitive advantage and be more likely to meet their business objects of increasing income, optimizing costs and managing risks, while those that fail to do so will inevitably fall behind.
Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?
As a data excellence consultancy, we know how data can create value and we are laser focused on making it create value for us as well as our clients. We pride ourselves on being a learning organization by offering regular internal discovery sessions that cover the broad range of topics in data from hands on data quality programs to platform and technology evaluations.
Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?
Designing for excellence in data management is fundamental to ensuring critical processes produce trusted data all along the data supply chain from provider to consumer. Data integrity is critical to our success and that of our clients, so we create business and operational processes and design data strategies with data at the core, not as an add on or afterthought. Designing for data ensures that the array of people, process and technology teams is engaged in defining critical data sets and determining quality tolerance levels. Embedding good data behavior into the way we work every day is part of building a data guided culture. The rewards are not only creating value for our company, but also in creating efficiency and resiliency in our people and processes.
