In parts one and two, we met Alex, a senior leader at an ambitious insurance brokerage, who had been chatting about the hassles caused by her team's business reports; before attending the meeting where Internal Audit went through their review of the data function. Buying a new tool called DataBee seemed to solve a lot of concerns.
Alex woke up and wished she hadn't. It had been a long and heavy night, but it had been both her leaving drinks and a celebration of her big new role. She had never thought of data as a career path to leadership, but the DataBee project had given her an opportunity and she was going to seize it.
Bamber Brokers had been keen to get her on board. They were super-impressed with what she had done to deliver data governance over at Lemon Street. That had been a challenge for them which they had never solved, so it was worth the effort to persuade
her.
Back at Lemon Street, Dan the COO was allocating Alex's work to the rest of the team. Deecey was the obvious candidate to take overthe Data Governance activity. After all, hadn't she been the brains behind the operation when Alex brought in DataBee?
Deecey wasn't going to refuse, but she had no desire to become a Data Governance person. Her heart was set on being a Data Scientist, who could play with cool tech and produce smart answers to all the hardest questions. On the other hand, she had been doing most of the day-to-day Data Governance activity already, only now she was accountable and not just responsible.
Lemon Street did go ahead and recruit for a Data Scientist. Deecey had applied for the role, but there were dozens of applicants and she didn't make it, not least because finding another person to take on Data Governance would be yet another thing for Dan to deal with.
Fortunately, Dan had managed to free up a couple of hours in his busy week. The Data Governance committee meeting had had a few declines, and there wasn't a great deal to talk about, so he'd been able to cancel it. The CFO had suggested dropping it from monthly to quarterly (with ad hoc meetings if required) and Dan wasn't going to
disagree.
A few months on and Deecey was off. A friend from her university days had launched DataFX, an insurtech startup, and invited her to come on board.
That meant a call to HR to source someone else to manage the data governance work. A couple of agencies came to discuss but Dan was horrified at what the market rate had become for a data specialist. His luck was in though, as the internal vacancies board brought him George.
George had been in the MI team, but had data quality experience through being the one that followed up on all the data entry errors. Dan agreed to fund a Data Management training course and George was delighted to progress their career. A courier delivered a copy of the DMBOK which was eagerly opened.
Not only that, but George read through the Lemon Street Data Policy and its related
documents. It was good stuff and aligned with what the course tutor talked about, although some of the activities were overdue. George felt that quarterly data governance meetings were not frequent enough, but Dan advised that Heads of Department had busy diaries and wouldn't respond well to more meetings on data.
Scrolling through LinkedIn on the train home, George saw Alex's face on a post. DataBee had just been brought in by Bamber Brokers and they had done a short video where she was explaining how transformative it was. Alex mentioned some features of DataBee which George didn't know about - something to research in the morning.
George did have some meaty work coming up though. It was coming up to two years since the last Internal Audit review of the data function, so they needed to get ready for that.
To be continued
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