I’ve had the chance this week to read Lisa Allen’s article supporting her entry into DataIQ 100

https://www.dataiq.co.uk/dataiq100/lisa-allen-head-of-data-ordnance-survey

And virtually meet with the Head of Data and insight at Arqiva Petrina Wright.

What strikes me about Lisa’s article and the discussion with Petrina is how much a part that data is going to play in helping businesses grow.

Back in the day there was the phrase “garbage in”, “garbage out” and the world of MI was about dealing with the garbage that came out, cleaning it and reporting on it giving internal data to internal teams to make better internal decisions

The explosion of the “data stack” and the amount of internal and external data now available to businesses is a million times that, that was available in the garbage in and garbage out era!

New roles have appeared in organisations – chief data officers, data scientists and a more sophisticated bread of information managers. All these roles when you read the job descriptions are about seeing data as an asset, seeing data and knowledge of it, as a revenue generator and helping businesses drive new business outcomes based on unlocking value from the data that we all capture and process in our business worlds today. The roles are also looking to drive more dynamic generation of knowledge and insight as we train artificial intelligent robots to process data and insight and visualise it in a way to speed up intelligent decision making

At the heart of Lisa’s article she definitely points to the technology and the need to put in the tech. There is a big hint in her story though, about how the business outcomes can only be truly realised by the data that you choose to flow through the tech and out the other end.

In the conversation with Petrina we recognised that the tech is important it needs to be right but the fascinating aspects of any go live is really based on the data that flows through the tech and the insight that can be gleaned and shared out of it.

Having grown up in the MI tech space and then moved into the core application processing space before moving into the world of Enterprise Architecture I sometimes lose sight of the data. Instead I focus more on the business model, ways of working and the technology architecture. The article from Lisa and the discussion with Petrina reinforced that best business outcomes are achieved with the best data. I must put data far more front and centre of mine and my teams thinking.

Thank you Lisa and Petrina for giving me that nudge I needed! And please keep nudging me!