My inbox is a bit of a war zone. I’m sure yours is as well. There’s a constant cycle of triage, reply, request and sometimes just putting out fires. The neediness of Teams chats and WhatsApp merely amps up the issue. And there never seems to be time to get to the root cause of the issue, just keep doing the same thing and hope it will somehow improve. Reminds me a lot of how data quality is managed, but that’s for another time!
Why the whinge? Because the spark for these webinars was lit in yet another dowsing of an inbox fire. Rather than rattling off replies, instead I opened the World’s Best Analysis Tool (that’ll be Excel, and when I say best, of course I mean free, ubiquitous and available) to theme each email and chat into an desingated category. This took some time and while I wouldn’t want anyone to look closely at my categorisation scheme, the similarity of questions was starkly apparent.
These questions come from three groups; people we’re currently working with, people we’ve worked with in the past and people who we’ve never met but find us on LInkedIn or some other public forum. It’s the reason I set up the Data Governance Network (DGN) nearly 10 years ago- namely being the “Data Governance” person in a university can be a very lonely job.
Normally it’s only you, no one is quite sure what you’re doing, and those that think they do merely consider you the goto person for fixing their data quality issues! The DGN is a fantastic support group and resource for those ploughing the lonely DG furrow, but that doesn’t stop a lot of inbox overspill coming my way. And I’m fine with that. HE has been a fantastic sector to work in, and anything Rav and I can do to improve its DG capability (often without any kind of commercial framework) is something we’re absolutely invested in.
Except for one thing. Time. The thing we’re all short of. So in a moment of inspiration, we thought “you know what we have all the material to answer these questions, we should just put it out there for free in a ‘build the field and they will come’ sort of idea”.
Great idea except as with ANYTHING that Rav and I come up with, it escalated quickly. How many topics do we want to cover? Two? No we need to split between the why and the how and the what. Four then? Hmm yeah but we really need to do operating model, scaling, dealing with top five issues, sponsorship, etc.
Honestly it was only through some ruthless editing we got it down to ten. If we’d been left unchecked you’d have signed up for about a year! We both love sharing this stuff and we know how hard it is - especially now - to make the case for the Why and Why Now, before the sometimes even more difficult actually getting started.
On the flipside, we see the myriad benefits with our customers in the sector (and also those we’ve not worked with!) and how this can be a genuinely transformational capability - IF considered carefully and deployed strategically.
So Rav went to learn all about power automate while I wrestled with the back end of the web site to create some kind of scalable sign up system. We did have some help from our fab graphics people who have the unenviable task to make my terrible slides look fantastic, but also those adjacent skills helping me answer “what the heck does this dialogue mean? I have absolutely no idea what to put in here” (which is a bit meta really as that’s the kind of stuff we get asked about DG!).
Having built something vaguely robust, all we had to do was repurpose some content. We’ve been lucky enough to work with 50+ universities and most of the sector bodies, and with that comes a lot of reusable stuff bisecting each stage of a Data Strategy and Governance journey. Shouldn’t take long we thought.
Hah. Setting ourselves a 2 topic/20 minute framework for each webinar means shoehorning in 20 slides and 2 hours of discussion. Unsurprisingly to everyone but us, we found that isn’t quite as simple as picking a couple of slides from the pack. It’s taken way longer than we wanted, but it’s been a really interesting experience laser focussing on just two things that are absolutely critical.
It was at this point that ambition took the reins again and we galloped off in a new direction; could we identify individual institutions journeys through the framework? As anyone who has worked with us or seen the first webinar, you’ll know we say every journey is different- depends on institution size, culture, priorities, skills and a whole host of other stuff (which we’ll get to in later webinars). By asking you to vote after each webinat we’ll (hopefully) be able to leave you with some tailored advice at the end of the series. If we can get the polls to work reliably that is!
We’re also hopeful - based on our experience of the DGN - just bringing like minded people together has a momentum all of its own. Nobody does collaboration as well as we do in HE and it’s one of the reasons we’re so pleased to see the level of signups. I was expecting 50, Rav thought 75- last time we looked it was 120. That’s a lot of institutions (sure we have multiple people from some) and shows us all the hard work so far has been worth it. We just hope it provides as much value, direction and motivation for all of you to get started.
If not, drop us an email. We’ll definitely get back to you. It just might take a while :)
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