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How to create a Data Strategy: Part 1 – Discovery

“How do we create a data strategy?” Many organisations face this question as they seek to modernise and drive greater value from their data. It’s a complex question to address because a data strategy needs to be custom-shaped to your organisation’s specific goals, culture, technology and value proposition. Your organisation is unique, so you can’t…

Modernising and Monetising your Data Governance

Covid 19 has forced many companies to rapidly accelerate their data and digital transformations. And with this rapid modernisation of systems and processes, the importance of having a robust Data Governance framework has also grown exponentially. Which specific Data Governance tasks vary from company to company depending on their size, their nature, and the level of data maturity they already possess.  So, data ownership remains a critical challenge for some, whereas it…

Is Data Mesh a potential Data Mess?

Since we re-emerged from lockdown, the Data & Analytics industry has seen a massive boost and investment in data as businesses escalate and turbocharge their data agendas on a technical and non-technical basis to ensure they have the best digital presence.  Throw in the emergence of Data Mesh as a potentially new and better way of organising, processing, and delivering data to organisations and you have all the potential ingredients for a perfect data storm.    Over the last few weeks,…

Gain control of your SharePoint Data

Most medium to large companies have a sizable Microsoft SharePoint space, containing thousands, if not millions of data files – but do you know what exactly is in them? In this post, we’ll lay out three core elements for gaining control of your SharePoint data, below, and most importantly why. Outlining the strategy and tooling…

Why fixing your data quality issues shouldn’t wait

In Gartner’s recent report on data quality, they listed the critical five things you should do to make your data complete, accurate, and fit for purpose. These are: Scope Governance Processes Roles & Responsibilities Technologies, with a very strong message to focus attention and energy on your Data Quality hotspots. However, the killer point for…

Is Data Governance at a crossroads, and does it need a “Data Mesh” refresh?

We’ve recently seen a trend in Data Governance with much debate over the differences between Data Governance and Data Management. Industry expert, Gartner, suggests that in 2025 some 80% of organizations seeking to scale their digital businesses will have failed because they do not take a modern approach to data and analytics governance (Gartner –…

Prefect: Should you utilise the next generation of data pipelining software?

What is data pipelining, and why does it matter? Data pipelining, or orchestration is an everyday activity performed by companies to move their data from one place, likely the primary storage location, to another, such as a cloud-based data lake, often including transformations during this process. Whilst this is a standard operational activity, the number…

What is Quality 4.0?

I am delighted that this week we can make more widely available the first publication on our leading-edge research project carried out for and with the CQI on Quality 4.0 (Q 4.0). In the July edition of Quality World, there was a cover feature – ‘Defining QUALITY 4.0.’ The editor Tracy Tyley and her team…

What If…? Self-doubt and The Elephant in the Room.

Anyone familiar with the TV programme Ru Paul’s Drag Race will recognise the saying “Remember if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” All too often we beat ourselves up when we make mistakes and given the past eighteen months, we should more than ever, celebrate our successes and…

Replicating Data Warehouse with Databricks Lakehouse

Introduction In a recent post, we outlined what a Databricks Lakehouse encompasses and why you may want to utilise one rather than a Data Warehouse and/or Data Lake. Following that introduction, this post will walk through an example use case, including code, for how the Databricks Lakehouse replicates some common warehousing patterns while having the…

The Pro’s and Con’s of using Data Lakehouse

When using your Data Platform to improve your Business Intelligence with useful dashboards, and reports, you’ll more than likely want to use a Data Warehouse. Add on your data science builds and storing your raw data cheaply, plus adding a Data Lake just for good measure, and the costs soon start adding up. Running both…

How to align a data governance and data strategy roadmap

In this post, we expand on our earlier focus on ‘How to Build a Data Governance Program by Stealth: Introducing the Lighthouse Projects Concept‘ by exploring how to expand the reach and impact of Data Governance through alignment with a robust data strategy. Why the need for Lighthouse Data Governance? In the earlier ‘Data Governance…