Data Management User Group 6 March 2024: Recap and reflections

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Tanj Jagpal
Tanj Jagpal Administrator
edited April 2 in Event recaps

A note from Sarah Williams reflecting on the Data Management User Group that was held on 6 March 2024:

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Great to see so many of you join us at the March Data Management User Group, both in person and online.  Every interaction with you helps us to glean rich insights, which fuel our future product innovations and we hope helps make work just that bit easier for you each day.

Vania Sigalas, Head of Strategic Propositions led the thinking for the day.  “We’re so passionate about bringing about the latest thinking in data - helping people and organisations to shape their future data strategies in what is an environment that is moving at an incredible pace. Thank you for making it today!”

The day gave us the opportunity for some of our fantastic speakers to share their insights, from @Mirjam Schuke and @Seamus Kyle on the latest and future Aperture Data Studio feature developments.  We also explored the world of Data Governance journeys with Experian’s CTO, Jon Westley, James from Sussex County Council and Maria and Rob from Leading Resolutions, finally rounding off the day with a show and tell from @Seamus Kyle.

So reflecting on the day a spotlight on Experian’s Data Quality Community…  We demonstrated the recent changes to the Community and highlighted how these were made to help our clients to access the latest thinking and updates from one central location. 

We’d love you to part of our Beta’s… Don’t forget we’re currently running Beta’s on Pushdown Processing; Real time Workflows (Check out the video in the Community) and finally our beta on the utilisation of GenAI. Reach out to @Mirjam Schuke if you’d like to help shape the future.

So a spotlight on Experian Aperture Data Studio feature developments…
Mirjam Schuke (@Mirjam Schuke), Senior Product Manager, Experian Data Quality gave us a sense of the feature developments that can help clients to achieve even more with Data Studio. In version 2.14 customers will be able to set custom timeframes to have batches of data auto deleted which will support Data retention policies. A new object ‘Rulesets’ is coming soon allowing validation rules to be managed on a business wide level. Besides downloading in CSV format, Excel is also available now. And if you want to compare and highlight differences between two data sources use the new ‘Compare step’ and see detailed changes and differences by column. We’re very excited to have these new features available by end of April/beginning of May.

Enhancements now live -‘Compare step’ to compare and highlight differences between two data sources, ‘Download as Excel’ besides CSV format, plus UX improvements.

Coming soon - ‘Rulesets’ for defining and managing business wide validation rules as well as being able to ‘auto delete data’ according to a customisable timeframe.

Spotlight from James Lizamore, Leader Data Governance Manager, Surrey County Council
Reflecting on approaches and pathways to start a truly data centric culture

When we’re talking about data and its quality, management and governance – it’s no easy feat to bring about change when working across complex, data or organisational structure. BUT, we’re seeing organisations, those with lots of complexity winning in their effort to bring about data driven cultures for the greater good of the organisation and the people they serve.   

It was our pleasure to have @James Lizamore share his extensive experience and views on embedding a five-year, data-led programme into the Council to bring about a data-led culture across an environment which is a whopping c.20,000 people base.  This can only be described as a mammoth effort to bring together 1,000 software systems across a multi-centric public facing service.

James, talked about the original scope of the initiative.  The need to improve the existing low data maturity across the council’s estate and the need to help people from across this multi-function environment to simply manage data better and come together.

Throughout the session we talked about the challenges facing organisations across data duplication to a no formal data management structure or established workstreams to ensure the organisation can have a holistic view of their data quality, management, and governance.

James Lizamore, Surrey County Council.
“Don’t reinvent the wheel, look for examples of where data is being managed (poorly or otherwise) in the organisation and improve on those. Data Strategy and Data Governance initiatives should not be overly bureaucratic or complex otherwise employees will find ways to circumvent your proposed improvements. The sweet spot is to build something that will be suitable for your particular organisation - not too complex or over engineered, BUT you should create a holistic initiative that covers, People, Process and Technology. A data strategy and data governance initiative are NOT a technical initiative. Focus on core principles like creating a culture that enables and values data to obtain true longevity. These were the Council’s guiding principles”.   

Data quality and data management centres around three fundamental areas James surfaced a number of critical points that really hit home to me and others in the room.  Many believe that data sits as an IT technical estate effort and responsibility, but fundamentally the approach needs to truly harness ‘people, processes and technology’ to bring about organisational and cultural change to truly centre around data quality. Doing this means the organisation can start to reap the value from the data and get the insights it needs to serve to enable the organisation to foster and flourish.

Elevating the position of data, getting buy-in and reporting One of the key points was that explicit buy-in from top management significantly facilitates the journey of implementing a data strategy and data governance initiative. However, where such implicit buy-in is not available, data strategy and data governance programs can still be very successfully implemented by focusing on collaboration, starting small with willing participative teams, proving value and benefits, and scaling out to more teams in a continuously expanding concentric ring approach. A mandatory component of any data strategy and data governance initiative is the need to address the issue of organisational behavioural change so that longevity and persistency in the uptake of the data strategy and data governance, improves data management practices are ensured. True success is obtained when we create a culture where people willingly participate because they can see the value in it, and it becomes part of their natural daily life and not an artificial add-on (let’s remember to “do data governance” at the end of our normal daily activities).

Pragmatic data stewards to reap the true value of the data James talked further about the need to centre around key metrics and to create a People Operating Model as crucial organisational structures that can act as the “official CLT and SLT face” of the data strategy and data governance initiative.  This all helps to promote the aims and objectives of the initiative and give guidance on data issues raised by teams.  A critical component to help drive uptake of a data strategy and data governance is landing the message that data should be owned and managed by the business and not IT. The vehicle that is used for enabling and managing data is the implementation of a data stewardship model which defines the roles and responsibilities of people involved in the model. There is no off-the-shelf and one-size-fits-all or data stewardship model. Each model must be tailored and suitable fit for a specific organisation. The Fire and Rescue directorate was selected as the pilot for rolling out data stewardship and learnings obtained from this pilot (and other pilots to follow) and will be used to tweak the model until a mass scaling out to the organisation is triggered.

James Lizamore, Surrey County Council.
“This was a one-time hit and to help us show the value we enlisted Experian’s Aperture Data Studio. At the beginning we trained a few key people in the team enabling us to pragmatically improve data quality and stewardship and get the best value from our data.  We’ve now implemented around 80 quality dashboards and processed 2 million records.  Now we pushed out about 85 Aperture view licenses to users, enabling us to have a nimble, data quality and reporting tool critical to the programme.”

“Experian’s Aperture Data Studio has started making a real and visible improvement in the council’s data issues and is 100% the right fit for the council. Having a data quality tool that fits your aims is a crucial component to a successful data strategy and data governance outcome. At the beginning of our initiative, I created the Data Governance Office, employed a specialist data quality steward, and trained him to an Expert level on the use of Aperture Data Studio. We then collaborated with a few business teams on various data quality use cases to prove Aperture’s wide functional offering as an all-rounder tool. This led to word-by-mouth and the number of further use cases snowballed to a situation where we are now having capacity problems – which is a great problem to have as it proved the success of the data governance initiative. We’ve now implemented around 80 quality dashboards and processed 2 million records.  We have thus far assigned 85 Aperture viewer licenses to users to reach a significant number of business teams with numerous more to follow still.

Spotlight from Experian, Jon Westley, Chief Data Officer
Creating a data excellence culture The sheer volume of data across our estate is expansion and we’ve always committed to providing the best data and intelligence to support consumers and businesses across the globe.

The big day, 25 May 2018, helped to further cement the idea that we wanted to further enhance a culture that has always centred around a single strategic approach and data governance framework. John talked extensively about the broad data sets Experian has supporting everyday decisions for our clients.

John Westley, Chief Data Officer, Experian

“For us it was all about centring around data quality, management and governance in order to create the most sophisticated intelligence from the foundational data and utilising our in-house solution.   Aperture Data Studio helped us drive even more vigour in our data estate.   We’ve been able to build a culture and a defined approach for managing data across our entire estate, including IT and data architecture, compliance, product, sales, marketing, customer management, etc because of this focussed governance programme.   The one point I always come back to though is: “You need to fix the data at source – data quality is the foundation for a successful data governance programme”.

Credit reporting and data quality in light of changing regulation.

Richard Sallis (@Rsallis), Propositions Manager and Pavan Rao (@Pavan Rao), Principal Consultant from Experian Data Quality led one of our breakout sessions focussing on the changing regulation and how it is further enhancing the need for a strong data quality foundation.

The FCA, Consumer Duty regulation along with the newly published Credit Information Market Study (CIMS) Report (December 2023), provided the focus of discussion in this session.

Pavan, Richard and group, talked through the new regulations bringing about the view that that data quality was instrumental to both regulations and surfacing Aperture Data Studio could assist CAIS (Credit Account Information Sharing) providers with their obligations under the new Duty.

CAIS providers in the room and online shared a common thread that data quality was a lens that was increasingly of focus following Consumer Duty and CIMS and using Aperture Data Studio was and is a way to manage through.   Discussion also continued to focus on the topics of mandatory data sharing, common data formats, mandatory regulatory reporting, data contributor requirements, data streamlining, data disputes, data processes all with a focus on timely reporting of key data to Credit Reference Agencies (CRAs), such as Experian.

If you’d like to talk further about Consumer Duty or CIMs reach out to @Rsallis.

Data Governance – Key learnings for preparing your organisation

Sarah Williams (sarah.williams@experian.com), Propositions Manager along with Sally Shepherd, Senior Data Consultant from Experian Data Quality introduced this data governance session and ongoing open discussion around the challenges being faced by organisations.

Introducing Maria McCoy and Rob Chapman from Leading Resolutions who kindly agreed to share their insights on the key considerations for organisations who are embarking on a data governance initiative.

Maria echoed the points made earlier in the day that many started their governance programme on the introduction of GDPR Regulation, 2018.  The need to understand consumer data and support consumers in the event of a data breach was one trigger point and the need for organisations to start implementing strategies that would bring about improved data management to help them manage their customers and resources more effectively.   There is a growing need for many to focus on their data maturity assessments to truly understand their data architecture and lineage as an organisation.  

Rob Chapman, Leading Resolutions “Today we’re seeing this play through as data becomes even more prominent in our environments and everyday lives - the need to balance data provenance, GenAI and Machine Learning and ultimately, the sheer volume of data and the utilisation of data”.

The discussion evolved where clients in the room and online started to share the reality of what they’re facing and the challenges that data management and data governance presented in their environments – the reality of bringing about a data-led programmes across multi-faceted environments is very challenging with many stakeholders and views to manage.

Maria McCoy, Leading Resolutions. “The reality is there are factors that drive the need for a governance programme and these can help you get buy-in from the top.  Factors like data breaches, mergers, regulation, efficiency and revenue drivers all help enforce why it’s important to put a programme around good data quality and management”.

There are a meridian of symptoms being felt by organisations from lack of trust in data, to silo’d databases, to poor data quality, lack of clarity around who owns the data, where the data came from, data duplication and poor reporting as well as solving data issues in the moment so you can reduce risk to the business.

Putting a data governance effort into play can really bring about efficiency, cost reduction, increased revenue, competitive advantage and reduce risk.  What’s key is having an initiative that drives the change.

Maria McCoy, Leading Resolutions “What’s great for Experian is they used their own Aperture Data Studio capability to support their very own data governance programme and helped to bring about data quality investigations, master and reference data management - and for continuous quality monitoring this has been an essential piece to bringing about the broader effort to set a clear strategy for data quality standards and ongoing communications and engagement”.

If you’d like to help us shape the future of our data governance proposition, please reach out to sarah.williams@experian.com.

Wrapping up the day - Show and tell

Seamus Kyle, Pre-sales Data consultant, Experian Data Quality

To round up the day, Seamus took us through the notification, pushdown processing, improved JSON Parser, SalesForce connection, data set compare, issue lists and functionality.

Focussing on one of these areas ‘The pushdown processing need’ was driven from a couple of scenarios that we found clients increasingly encountering as they started to utilise the increasingly large volumes of data and secondly the growing popularity of cloud-native databases (e.g. Snowflake).  

Seamus shared “The Compare Step was created in response to a common use case. The need to track changes in specific data sets over time. For example, monthly figures - how a particular record changed and, if it has, how exactly has it changed? This has always been possible in Aperture Data Studio, but could be complex to set up, particularly if you are checking a lot of columns. The Compare Step makes it very easy and flexible”.

For further details on new features, please reach out to seamus.kyle@experian.com.

Thank you for joining us on the day.  If you didn’t make it in person this time, we do hope you can join us next time.    Thank you, Vania Sigalas, Experian for continuing to drive the opportunities for us all to meet and share insights.

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