Resources - under construction

This sidebar supplements Driving Data Projects, published in 2024 by BCS.

While studying creative problem-solving, decision-making, and the changing workplace, I relied on various articles and other experts to conclude how data skills were shifting. Here are links to my main sources, arranged by topic.

Data Terms & Concepts

Gartner Maturity Curve The global survey asked respondents to rate their organizations according to Gartner's five maturity levels for data and analytics. It found that 60 percent of respondents rated themselves in the lowest three levels.

DQ Global Standards Report The analysis presented in the DQ Global Standards Report 2019 (the “Report”) is based on a methodology integrating the methodologies from international organizations, universities, and corporations with proprietary analysis. - (Hint: It’s where everyone gets their best data literacy ideas!)

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society - academic paper offering perspective on the definition of data literacy.

Gartner Glossary - 3rd party offering perspective on the definition of data literacy.

Data: All data can be categorized as machine-readable, human-readable or both. …Some data is readable by machines and humans, as in the case of CSV, HTML or JSON formats.

Data as art (Tufte) Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Graphics Press 2001). The viewer should be given the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space: the ‘less is more’ philosophy in the context of data visualization.

Altamira - (Data as a Service) Managing data as an ongoing service helps realize near-term value from the data investments and paves the way for quickly getting more value in the future.

Data Trends

Gartner: Gartner predicted that ‘through 2017, 60 percent of big data projects will fail to go beyond piloting and experimentation and will be abandoned’. (This Gartner report is archived and is included for historical context only.)

New Vantage Partners (not available) but quoted in the HBR article, the percentage of firms identifying themselves as being data-driven has declined in the past 3 years – from 37.1% in 2017 to 32.4% in 2018 to 31.0% this year.

McKinsey: While measuring and evaluating the value of data transformations is hard (especially in the early phases), approximately 25 per cent of an organisation’s budget depends on data processes and services supporting their efforts.

McKinsey: 70 per cent of complex, large-scale change programs don’t reach their goals.

McKinsey: The success rate for data transformation efforts is consistently low: less than 30% succeed.

Data Management Roles

BCS Occupations The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 11% job growth in computer and information technology occupations over the next ten years – much faster than the average for all occupations.

Demand for business intelligence (BI) analysts will grow 21% between 2014 and 2024. A brisk marketplace exists for data management, intelligence, and governance services. Companies like Tableau are setting bold public goals, like their 2021 commitment to enable 10 million data learners over the next five years.

Overlap in data skills and roles: has advantages and disadvantages. The graph intuitively shows how much time each role spends on different tasks and the overlap of skills. This can vary significantly across companies, especially when only a subset of these roles exists in a team.

Data Roles for Beginners: Data management is compared to real estate management, as both require effectively organizing, maintaining, and utilizing valuable assets to help convey underlying components and imagine how they all operate together.

Governance

  • BREAKS IN CUSTOMER TRUST

While organizations defending civil liberties point out policy inconsistencies and the essential roles such companies have in protecting consumer privacy and security, such headlines motivate the public to collect petitions and write open letters to the leaders themselves.

Zoom settled $85 million in claims after ensuring end-to-end encryption to protect users’ data while sharing that same data with Facebook and Google.

Apple looks for abusive content by scanning ‘private’ photos on people’s iPhones.

NYTimes, How Companies Learn Your Secrets Discusses case of how Target's statistician Andrew Pole identified several significant patterns indicating a customer's pregnancy status (and how that could be a violation of privacy).

Big Tech Complied With 85% of Government Requests, Handed Over Data in First Half of 2020 In the first half of 2020, Big Tech companies complied with 85 per cent of government requests for user information.

How Big Tech created a data ‘treasure trove’ for police Companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft received more than 112,000 data requests from local, state and federal officials, with Facebook accounting for the largest number of disclosures.

  • ORGANIZATIONS

The EFF is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world and champions user privacy, free expression and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism and technology development. Its mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people worldwide.

Federated/Unfederated: An Analysis of Enterprise Architecture for Federated Environments

mINDSET

Paradigms: The relationship between paradigms, mental models, mindset, behaviors, and culture

Computational thinking is a broad problem-solving process that everyone can use and includes four elements: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithms.

Learning and Unlearning: Companies have sought to become “learning organizations” that continually transform themselves but struggle to make real progress in this area. The process of unlearning has three parts. First, you must recognize that the old mental model is no longer relevant or effective. Second, you must find or create a new model to better achieve your goals. And third, you need to ingrain the new mental habits.

Project Management

Plan:

  • McKinsey: Reducing costs without jeopardizing growth

Change Management

Prosci - ADKAR’ is an acronym for the five outcomes an individual needs to achieve for a change to be successful: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. The model was developed nearly two decades ago by ProSci.

Prosci - The Prosci Change Triangle (PCT) Model is one of the two foundational models of the Prosci Methodology, in addition to the ADKAR Model. This simple but powerful framework helps practitioners understand the four critical aspects of any successful change and how they relate to and promote project health. It highlights where change management fits into the bigger picture that includes the leaders involved and how the project is managed.

SPONSORSHIP

Prosci - 3 Reasons Executives Fail at Sponsorship. When asked to identify the greatest contributor to success when managing change, project teams state executive sponsorship. Yet, project managers consistently report a lack of visible and active sponsorship on the part of their executive business leaders. In fact, nearly 50% of teams rate the effectiveness of their sponsor as poor to fair.

PMI - The executive sponsor has a direct impact on whether projects meet objectives. Projects with highly effective executive sponsors meet or exceed goals more than three times as often as those with ineffective sponsors.

Christine Haskell is the author of Driving Your Self-Reflection (2021), Driving Results Through Others (2021), Driving Data Projects: A Comprehensive Guide (2023), and The Thinking Practice: What craftspeople can teach us about problem-solving in the advent of AI (pending, 2024).

She teaches graduate courses in informatics at Washington State University’s Carson School of Business and as a visiting lecturer at the University of Washington’s iSchool.