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What are the costs of poor quality data?

Poor data quality costs businesses, charities, and governments trillions of pounds each year. Most organisations talk of digital transformation, and as business becomes ever increasingly digitised and complex, this cost is likely to increase. Managing data quality issues is seen as one of the most significant challenges for leaders. Gartner research highlighted 60% of respondents…

How to create a data product focused data strategy 

Data Engineering and storage costs are spiraling (increasing by 30% in the past year!) (US and European cloud prices set to soar in 2023 – Techzine Europe), so data leaders are naturally looking at ways to maintain the velocity of delivery, whilst also bucking up their data governance efforts and keeping an eye on ever-increasing…

Thinking of doing Data Mesh? – Start with Data Products

Data mesh has been the number one topic of conversation among the data crowd over the past few years. From the CDO Exchange to Big Data London, which even had a stage dedicated to the subject! The four principles of data mesh have been debated, dissected, and diagnosed at length via books, blogs, conferences, and…

Can you really build a cloud data platform in six weeks?

In short: yes, but no, but yes…sort of…it depends. For a better answer, let’s start by describing what we mean by a cloud data platform, as it can mean a few different things. Generally, it refers to a series of different components and resources deployed in the cloud to ingest, store, process, and report upon…

A data strategy is not a ‘strategy for data’ 

Most data strategies fail to make it from reading material to change accelerant. This means that they don’t create tangible outcomes. Worse, they fail to address gaps in understanding and expectation. Simply, they don’t achieve relevance. When this happens, data and analytics remain an isolated technical domain focused on core activities’ ‘numerical exhaust.’  Why does…

How to manage spiralling cloud costs

“81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending by C-suite” VentureBeats, 2022 “Organisations with little or no cloud cost optimisation plans end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it”  Gartner, 2022 Big Tech under pressure from cost-conscious cloud customers (ft.com) The cost of…

What are the challenges of building a data platform?

When building a data platform for your business, you need to anticipate and plan for any potential challenges you may encounter. That’s where a data engineering specialist can help.  With decades of data experience behind us, we’ve seen and dealt with practically every problem you might encounter during data platform development. In this guide, we’ll…

What are the benefits of working with a data governance consultancy?

In this blog, Oakland’s Andrew Sharp talks to Terri Linnet Bickford, one of Oakland’s senior data governance consultants, about the advantages of working with an external provider. They talk about the benefits of having access to a team of experts, the value of a data governance maturity assessment, and the importance of culture in establishing…

Why do you need a data platform?

If you’ve been exploring ways of optimising your data management and strategy, you’ve likely heard of or been recommended a data platform. But what is a data platform, and do you really need one for efficient data management?  In this guide, we’ll share the benefits and capabilities of a bespoke data platform so that you…

What is a data platform?

In today’s digitised business landscape, the ability to collect, analyse, and manage data effectively can be the critical difference between a business’s success and failure. But what exactly enables businesses to harness the full potential of their data? Enter the customer data platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about data…

Does Microsoft Purview solve the Data Governance Challenge?

Microsoft Purview Data Governance for the cloud, on-premise, multi-cloud and office 365 workloads. Introduction Most organisations are exploding with data that has been collected, transformed, and reported on, but this data is often not well-tracked as the organisation becomes more data-driven, increasing two pain problems that have been growing for the last few decades: How…

How to solve the leakage problem

You can’t have failed to escape the recent press surrounding the water industry and leakage (especially here in the UK. It is estimated that 3 billion litres escape through leakage every day in England and Wales (the equivalent of 1,180 Olympic-sized swimming pools). Tracking down three billion litres of lost water – BBC News In…