Discover a wealth of data innovation and expertise within the Oakland blog hub – equipping you with all the latest industry knowledge to help your business get the most from its data.
Demystifying Data Ownership
Most organisations rely on their data as a strategic asset to thrive and operate efficiently in the most competitive business landscape. Maintaining a smoothly running operation backed with data requires careful consideration of data ownership, a crucial but often neglected aspect. While data ownership might appear to be a simple concept, implementing it can pose…
Will the real Data Strategy please stand up!?
We don’t have a particular affinity with 00’s hip-hop. But we tend to hear something like this when data projects admit they are in difficulty or aren’t getting traction. It’s generally the data strategy that’s to blame, right? Not in our experience. Don’t get me wrong, the data strategy could just be ‘wrong’ but it’s…
Accepting Anxiety
Everyone suffers with anxiety to some degree at times. Yes – everyone! Even those people who seem uber confident and appear to have the world at their feet. We have become masters of disguise and in reality we all have our doubts and worries and those pesky little thoughts which play on our minds and…
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 rising rapidly, with a 30% increase in 2022 (US and European cloud prices set to soar in 2023 – Techzine Europe). As US and European cloud prices were set to soar in 2023, data leaders searched for ways to maintain delivery speed while improving data governance and managing budgets….
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…
