Daragh O Brien's blog

Introduction

Both in my past life working in a large corporate and in my on-going advisory and coaching engagements with clients I'm met with a few common themes:

• Training is seen as an expense, a luxury (it's often the first thing cut.
• Training needs are based on the HR department or Training Department's view of what the need is
• Training is often done in response to a crisis, not a planned change or transition
• Organisations send their key staff out for a few days off-site training (during which the same staff miss half the training as they answer calls, respond to emails, and generally don't get a chance to switch off from the day job to focus on knowledge transfer).
• People go back to the office and try to implement their new skills only to find that "that's not the way we do things here", leading to atrophy of knowledge
•  and loss of skill.

This sad state of affairs leads to ineffective training. All to often I've experienced (both as an educator and as a learner) the sense of lightbulbs not going on in the class. People go back thinking they have learned little, learned nothing, or with a fragmented understanding of what they have learned.

In short: the training has not been effective. Instead of teaching them to fish for fish, they've been left holding a rod that can only catch old boots and tin cans.

And thus we find the self-fulfilling prophecy of ineffective training. Without a focus on doing it effectively, the training has limited effectivness, is not applied correctly (and therefore can't have the desired/required effect) and is branded as an expensive luxury. So staff are left relying on "best efforts" and learning from their peers and their understanding of processes and principles.

Over the past few weeks I've been talking with a number of leading Information Quality and Data Governance professionals about issues and challenges in the respective professions and the industry sectors that they work in.

One key message keeps coming back: Skills are in short supply. And the skills that are in short supply are not the traditional data management technology skills (although they are thin on the ground as well). What is scarcest at the moment is the hybrid beast that is the Information Quality or Data Governance professional. One colleague tells me that they are called multiple times each day offering them full time roles, but they are happy performing their consulting roles.

The forthcoming Data Protection Regulation will further tighten the skills pool for people with an understanding of quality systems and principles applied to Information and Data Governance principles applied to privacy and Data Protection. Take a look at Article 35-37 and Article 28. The shift in emphasis is a shift towards a certain hybrid skill set. And the fact that EU Data Protection principles and practices are increasingly being adopted elsewhere (including the US) means there is a clear market for these skills.

But how big is the market? Dr Tom Redman (my friend and mentor) cited a figure of 1 million INFORMATION QUALITY practitioners being required in the US alone. He estimates at least 10 Million are required around the world.

Yesterday Silicon Republic ran a story about 6700 email addresses and passwords, some of which were from Government Departments and large Irish corporates, that were discovered posted in a "prominent hacker forum". The original article contained speculation about where this data could have been obtained from, with an implication of a potentially serious security breach somewhere in the information chain from browser to internet. The whiff of internet intrigue and black hat operations hung heavy in the air.

But reality is never as sexy as a Mission Impossible trailer. While the attack vectors that were hinted at in the original article were all possible, the actual root cause appears to have been much more mundane and much more common place. In an update to the story posted later in the day, Silicon Republic reported that:

The 6,700 leaked email addresses and passwords containing details of workers at organisations like HSE, AIB, and Enterprise Ireland, as well as many users’ Gmail and Hotmail addresses and passwords, came from a shopping website that went out of business but hadn’t been shut down properly.

The developers and the former website owners were not aware that the data had been compromised and had been posted on a hacker forum until they were told about it yesterday. A test server had been left running, with data on it and the site was still live, which they were also unaware of.

And this is where the confluence of Information Security, Data Protection, and Information Governance becomes significant.

I was going through the post this morning, including some that had arrived yesterday. In the bundle was the brochure/magazine/sales pitch in the picture opposite. It promotes "Solutions for Business Drivers" (but the branding suggests that is a singular thing) and it extolled me to "Be a Change Hero". I was psyched. I was enthused. I was...

... I was really confused why the mail item was addressed to a different person (click image on right to zoom), who obviously works for a company I used to work for, but sent to my home address. Particularly as it is approaching the 3rd anniversary of my leaving that company, a journey which led me to set up Castlebridge Associates. Checking back through my "junk  I need to shred and recycle" pile I found another few of these flyers that have been sent by a very large Data Tech Vendor.

I regularly tell consulting clients and learners on courses I teach that, if you are in the information management game you are really in the game of selling and ensuring trust. Ultimately, information quality is about being able to trust that the information you are providing or consuming is actually 'fit for purpose' for your purposes. Data Governance is about being able to trust that everyone in your organisation knows the role they need to play in delivering trusted and trustworthy information to customers, be they internal customers or external to your organisation.

And Data Protection is based on principles of trust. People give you data on trust: they trust that you aren't going to use it nefariously. Likewise, you are trusting that they will give you information that you can trust to drive your business processes (as an aside, I often put fake data into webforms that are asking excessive questions for the purpose I'm filling in the form).

Today, the EU Commission published the 7th Edition of the Consumer Conditions Scoreboard, a report which outlines the level of integration within the EU Single Market and highlights barriers and difficulties that consumers experience when shopping in the Single Market. The findings in relation to on-line shopping were interesting in particular.

• 69% of consumers have been subjected to unsolicited direct adverstisments and offers, up 8% on the previous study in 2010.
• 29% cite concerns about misuse of their personal data or payment details as a reason for not shopping on-line.