Three Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Data

“We need to help organisations get back to simplicity. One of the ways to do that around data management is to standardise, rather than have fragmented skill sets [and] adopt standards around traditional data integration and cloud integration of data.

“The use of metadata, which is massively underinvested in, helps you build a catalogue of your information assets. That can really deliver that democratisation of data and that self-service that most businesses clamour for.

“And then the last bit is about providing the same platform to do all of those things and then provide extensions like APIs to allow you to really push that data out in real time. Yes, people want to leverage it internally, but it's most important to drive customer experience in the front end.”

“We're seeing a maturity curve where organisations realise that in order to effectively get value, they need to have different types of people within their organisation.

“So we've seen an emergence of roles, like chief digital officer or chief data officer. It shows an investment in the data. And then as part of the maturity curve, we're starting to see distinct roles evolve within organisations like data stewards, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers. Organisations [with these roles] have gone through a sort of maturity curve around how they can maximise the return on investment from data.

“And then if you think about how you invest in the data itself, once you've got the infrastructure to reduce that noise around the complexity, and massive skill sets that we've got, now we can start to invest in the data. And then it's about making sure you've got really, really high-quality data assets.”

“One of the things that's increasing now is you see things like the quality of data being reported as a key management statistic.

“And there's even organisations that have taken that to the extreme where individuals are compensated based upon the compliance of data with the governance and privacy policies the company has.

“We're starting to see that emerge. I think increasingly you'll see organisations start to take those types of things on board more and more.”