Who you have at your meeting is crucial to it’s success.
There is no point trying to solve a problem with a key department not represented or trying to agree expenditure without the budget holder there. Think about what you are trying to achieve and who you need to help you.
The agenda is a key tool to ensuring a successful meeting. It makes the leader think about the best use of the time in the meeting and outlines to the attendees what will be happening during the meeting. Timings on the agenda are very useful especially if you have a few talkative attendees. The chair can use phrases like “We’ve only got 20 minutes to discuss this so thanks Janet, lets hear from John” (more…)
During my life in the corporate world, like most people, I spent alot of time in meetings. Often these achieved little and seemed to be devices to fill up the days of managers who wanted to feel important. Once I got involved in business improvement I joined the campaign to improve the meetings experience across the organisation.
Moving into consultancy work has allowed me to carry on my crusade for better meetings. I’ve summarised my ideas in this series of blog posts covering the whole alphabet. I’ll be covering a different letter each week, so watch this space!
A number of recent events have lead me to consider a little bit more about the permanence of data. Is data a permanent or a temporary thing?
Having just come back from a trip to the USA, we noticed many cultural differences which we had to get used to:
Amongst the many cultural differences, it was interesting to note some of the different approaches to recycling. Since waste minimisation, like good data quality, may take more effort than sending waste to landfill or providing poor quality data updates we need to ensure that people have the right motivation and awareness both to minimise waste and to maximise data quality.
Different approaches to waste minimisation provide a few useful comparisons of the approaches needed to improve approaches to data quality
Most businesses are trying to ensure that they have good data, or as they might say in Yorkshire “Reet good data” (hence the flat cap image).
Before expending lots of time (and money) polishing and honing your data to perfection, have you assessed whether you are improving the right data?
A recent Twitter conversation with Sarah Burnett (a leading UK public sector analyst) was the trigger for this slightly tongue in cheek blog post. Sarah originally posted the following tweet:
Which is an astounding statistic. Sarah and I then the following short discussion:
So, have we now reached the “Data Event Horizon”?
Those of you who are familiar with our blog will recall that we periodically compare how people treat data compared to real life situations. Two examples of this approach are “Would you allow this?” and “The Data Accident Investigation Board”.
Taking a similar approach this post will compare data accident reporting with Health and Safety Reporting.
I just spotted an interesting article in Computer Weekly “High touch is just as important as high tech“.
The article paints an objective picture about how human interactions have been changed by technology.
From a data perspective there is an interesting quote:
“…managing the increase in data was slowing down business processes and the resulting cumbersome and inefficient internal systems were the main barrier to business success in 2011”
I’m not sure I agree, does this match what you are experiencing?
As part of a recent data quality assignment, I had cause to use the recently released 2nd edition of “Master Data Management and Data Governance” by Alex Berson and Larry Dubov.