Blog

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…

Taming your data assets with Databricks

Safely, securely, and efficiently handling data at any scale is challenging. Here at Oakland, we’ve had years of experience helping complex organisations tame their vast data assets to draw meaningful insights from them. These years of experience and the fact we are passionately tech-agnostic enable us to recommend the right tool for the job. One…

Data Mesh – Is this the evolutionary trigger to reinvigorate Data Governance?

Just over a month on from the crowds and excitement at Big Data London (BDL).  One of the key themes, which even had its own theatre was Data Mesh, and most of the two days were spent debating Data Mesh’s merits. While the first and second Data Mesh principles of “Data as a Product” and…

How to create a Data Strategy: Part 3 – Plan

So far in this series on data strategy creation, we’ve discussed the importance of data strategy discovery activities to establish a current state assessment and how to define the data capabilities required for your ideal future state. In this article, we’re going deeper into what’s required to build the roadmap for your data strategy.  We’re…

Beware the tech sweetie jar!

If you like shiny new gadgets, an Energy and Utilities trade show is usually a sweet shop designed with you in mind. But just because it’s tempting doesn’t mean it’s good for you. I hear so many tales of woe when I go to these shows. Things like control engineers having to look across ten…

Azure Bicep – Deploy a Data Platform in One Click

Azure Bicep is a declarative language for Azure infrastructure, it is the successor of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates. Bicep is one of the languages through which Azure has enabled the deployment of IaC (Infrastructure as Code).   What is Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as Code is the declaration of compute, networking and infrastructure resources…

Accentuate the Positive

For many people, the month of September can bring back fond memories of a new school year and the anticipation of wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. Who remembers the excitement of writing in a blank exercise book, picking out a new school bag, wearing shiny new school shoes or the thrill of catching…

Where to start with data governance tooling?

Good Data Governance is becoming an essential component for organisational growth and resilience in an increasingly data-driven world. The challenge for Data Governance practitioners is how to support their organisation along the journey to high data maturity and effective governance. To help with this journey, Data Governance tools are often considered, but with a multitude…

The rise of Power BI (and BI as a whole) 

The rise of Power BI (and BI as a whole) Over the last few years, Power BI has gone from a visualisation tool on the side to become front and centre in the business intelligence (BI) industry. A combination of including the tool in Office 365 subscriptions and adding more and more features over the…

What happens when your employees think they are doing better with Data Governance than they actually are 

The classic start point in understanding your Data Governance need in an organisation is to assess your data maturity. Once you have chosen which data maturity assessment to use, this assessment will tell you where you are doing well and not so well.  Then as the theory goes, it will allow you to work out…