Global Data Strategy Blogs

As thought leaders in the data management industry, our staff regularly contribute blogs with their ideas and insights on data management.

Successful Data Governance: Not All Doing Is Equal

August 2025, Scott Garner, Senior Consultant
“…Why is it that some data governance programs thrive, while others stall? Why do some organizations have data governance fully embedded into daily operations while others are still struggling to get business adoption? If they’re all “doing data governance”, then why do only some organizations experience success? It’s because when it comes to doing data governance, not all doing is equal..”
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The Ascent of AI: Standing on the Shoulders of Data Management Giants

July 2025, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
“…Today a lot of faith (and time & money) is being put into Artificial Intelligence (AI) to unlock many key insights into our contemporary world. AI champions claim the application of AI will transform businesses, indicate new ways of solving problems, improve the customer experience, accelerate decision making and so on. But to deliver the expected step change of AI, those who advocate and practise it will also need to embrace the fact that its roots and success lie in the disciplines of data management…”
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Data Stewardship: Turning the Data Ship Around

February 2025, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
“…In any governance or quality initiative, having committed and skilled data stewards in the engine room of change is the only guarantee of success. Without an engine, ships and data governance programs inevitably drift and often sink. If you want to turn your data ship around, put a laser focus on and invest in data stewardship and the people who deliver it to ensure your organization reaps the real value of better data. By doing this…”
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AI and Data Governance: A Win-Win Partnership

November 2024, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“How do you ensure AI and data are governed effectively to protect individuals, organisations and society from harm? First, it’s clear that for both AI and data you need rigorously defined, implemented and enforced governance frameworks, set within a regulatory and operational context. As a more established discipline, data governance has relatively mature frameworks developed over several years”…
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Data Governance: The Human Element

September 2024, Scott Garner, Senior Consultant
…“I find data governance to be a fascinating topic. Yes, I fully understand that a statement like that puts me directly in the “data nerd” category, and I’m ok with that. But to be honest, it’s not just the data part of data governance that I’m passionate about. What fascinates me most about data governance is how heavily influenced it is by the human element.”…
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Data Governance: The Human Element

Telling Your Data Governance Story

May 2024, Scott Garner, Senior Consultant
…“In my experience, organizations that have successful data governance programs are more likely to produce long-term, sustainable value from data. Business stakeholders not only understand data governance, but they embrace it and drive it throughout the organization. Having said that, I also know that data governance is often a very challenging concept for people to understand…..”
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Data Quality and AI/ML – The Best of Friends?

September 2023, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) have become the focus of global news headlines over the past months. Pessimists fear that the growth of AI/ ML poses a serious threat to the future of humanity, invoking Terminator style doomsday scenarios. Optimists claim AI/ML can be the saviour of humankind, a vital tool in helping us identify and avoid impending future problems and disasters, often before we are aware of them….”
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Data Governance – Deliver Fast and Deliver Often

March 2023, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“As an experienced data governance specialist, I am often asked why many data governance initiatives fail. There are many reasons for failure but having helped many organisations refresh and revitalise governance programmes that are seen as not delivering their promised benefits, a common problem often rears its head. This problem is that in many organisations that have gone down the data governance path there is a widely held view that a key reason for failure is that data governance takes too long to demonstrate any real benefits to the organisation….”
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The Data Craft – Developing Skills for the Digital Age

August 2021, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“When apprentices joined the teams of masons and carpenters who built the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, they acquired their skills by learning from the master craftsmen who had many years of experience, often gained through trial and error. Data management has many similar characteristics; like cathedral building it’s part science, part art. How can we pass this experience on?…”
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Data Quality Shortcomings – Another Case for Data Quality

April 2021, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“Data quality has again made headline news in the UK, and as usual for all the wrong reasons. In February 2021 UK TV and press extensively covered a story which emerged in the city of Liverpool, a place best known as the home of the Beatles. This story was however not centred on ‘Yesterday’ and the rest of their back catalogue but on today’s most pressing priority…”
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Data Quality – a Multimensional Approach

August 2020, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…“In my blogs and articles over the lockdown period I’ve avoided talking about the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and the heavy reliance on good quality data to support the models needed to combat and mitigate its effects. I have decided to break my silence in this blog as a major data story recently hit the headlines in my part of the world, Wales in the United Kingdom. This story was literally so close to home that I felt impelled to highlight and comment on it, and use it to stress why the need for good data quality is more important than ever…”
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Digital Transformation Requires a Data Foundation

April 2020, Donna Burbank, Managing Director
…“Digital Transformation” has been top of mind for many organizations in recent years. Now, most are coming to terms with the fact that this Digital Transformation needs to occur more rapidly than they had expected. As business moves nearly completely online and organizations launch or rethink their digital journey, many quickly realize that a strong data foundation is needed in order to support digital success. Unfortunately, this data foundation is often not in a state robust enough to rapidly enable a digital business model. Any digital presence requires quality, curated data that is …
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Selling Data Governance – How to Make Friends and Influence People

April 2020, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…For those of us who work with data every day, we recognise its critical importance and the need to leverage it and so increase its value to our organisations. We also know that to achieve this we need to make people personally responsible for data through data ownership and data stewardship, practices that are at the core of Data Governance. But to the people we are trying to convince to give us the backing to make this happen, it’s often not as obvious. So how can you convince people that Data Governance is something to be invested in today, and not in the future after today’s problems are solved? Here are a few suggestions…
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Architecting Accountability – Making Data Governance & Data Architecture Work Together

January 2020, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
…Over many years I have helped many organisations design and implement data governance programmes. Delivering a workable and sustainable data governance framework requires the business and IT to work together to answer two fundamental governance questions: (1) What data domains, types, sources etc. should be within the scope of formal data governance and how should this be determined? (2) How should responsibility and accountability for this data be allocated? At the heart of data governance is the requirement to establish business and IT accountability for data. Read more

Data Quality – an Architecture for Success

October 2019, Nigel Turner, Principal Consultant, EMEA
I started working in data management in the dim and distant days of the mid 1990s when I was part of a small team in the Business Strategy function of a global telecommunications company. The team had been tasked with exposing the root causes of a problem that the CEO at that time had homed in on. Although many millions had been spent on acquiring and deploying large scale IT solutions to support the company’s operations, this investment was considered to be at least in part a failure as there was growing evidence that operational inefficiencies and process breakdowns were commonplace, despite the fact that the business cases for these investments had promised … Read more