Data governance and data quality is the precursor to data-driven decision making, say Ian Lever and Jason Baines.
In the ever-changing social housing sector landscape, ensuring residents’ health and safety remains a top priority. Whether that be through delivering effective compliance programmes or ensuring that the quality of our properties meet WHQS 2023 and provide a healthy living environment, accurate data is key to understanding residents’ needs and landlords’ ability to service them. Having the ability to make informed data-driven decisions is critical.
The spotlight on data quality
All Government bodies across the UK have intensified the spotlight on data quality and the use of accurate data to provide assurance over a landlord’s ability to deliver crucial services. Gone are the days when executives could point to data quality as the cause of a compliance breach.
The message is clear; boards and executives are responsible for an organisation’s data and its accuracy. Which begs the question, if you were asked where your data originated from, how you captured that data and how it is maintained, would you be able to accurately answer? Do you know where your data is stored, and more importantly is it all stored in the same place, or are there multiple versions of truth across the organisation?
There is a growing momentum within the sector towards crafting robust data strategies, implementing comprehensive data governance and data quality programmes, and proactively engaging with data quality issues and tackling them head-on. This is an important shift in priority, but let’s be real – this journey demands not just time, but also substantial resources to ensure that it is done correctly.
It’s not only about honing data skills; it’s about leveraging the expertise of subject matter experts to validate rules, reporting and unearthing potential quality issues. Unfortunately, these resources and the time required are not freely available, and often these data quality projects do not deliver much more than a strategy.
Too many tools for the job?
In many organisations, data is often fragmented across multiple data management systems, which can be due to a variety of reasons. Perhaps there was a merger between two organisations and the data has not been correctly integrated between different systems. Managing multiple legacy systems ultimately leads to duplication of data, creating the potential for inconsistency, inefficiency and inaccuracy, as well as problems in accessing, analysing and reporting data. This disorganised mixture of data makes it impossible to see a holistic picture.
There are tools available claiming to do the heavy lifting in ensuring data quality, and yes, some of them are pretty good. But in practice, many organisations find themselves struggling to fully exploit these tools – from the initial configuration to keeping up with business process changes and ensuring accurate reporting. In addition, reporting of false positive data quality issues causes alarm and is not helpful. Let us not ignore the elephant in the room, the hefty price tag attached to these tools often leads decision-makers pondering their value proposition.
So, how do we address these crucial areas effectively, especially if you don’t have the ability to hire data engineers or strategy/project managers?
At Altair, we can help.
We can assist you with building a bespoke data strategy, support your organisation to actively engage with your data owners (because IT does not own your data), help with creating a governance structure and pinpoint data quality red flags.
We understand that your time is precious, that’s why we advocate a pragmatic approach, prioritising looking at key datasets initially. We will do the leg work and recommend actions and report on progress periodically. We think of it as data quality as a service and see it as an affordable, ongoing relationship based on continually improving the approach to data quality and effectively using your data.
If you wish to learn more about how we can assist you in the provision of an effective data governance and data quality approach, offering increased assurance around your critical data sets, then please contact us.
Ian Lever is director of digital and technology consultancy at Altair (ian.lever@altairltd.co.uk) and Jason Baines is principal consultant (jason.baines@altairltd.co.uk)