And so, this is Christmas

As we wind down for the year, lots of you will be getting festive emails from suppliers or receiving links to LinkedIn posts about Santa’s Data Problems.

Ho Ho Ho. Oh no, no, no!!!

I’m going to be blunt: we stopped doing those kind of things about six years ago. We stopped because:

1. It’s really hard to make that kind of thing funny without stretching the “joke” to breaking point.
2. It’s difficult to make accurate analyses of the data management or data protection issues with mythical figures or historic events.
3. Everyone hates my puns.

The Posts of Christmas Past

For the nostalgic among you, here are the Posts of Christmas Past coming back to haunt you.

• 2020 – A post where instead of making puns about Santa, I wrote about safe online shopping and data quality. (And we posted that in November for Black Friday)
• 2020 – A post where I use the general structures of A Christmas Carol to look back on the data management lessons of the “Great Disruption”
• 2015 – A post where I looked at the New Year’s Resolutions that organisations might want to make about Data
• 2015 – A post where I gave into temptation and wrote about behavioural analytics and the Naughty List
• 2014 – A post where we examined the data quality and data protection practices of Santa Inc.
• 2013 – A Year End Review Post that doesn’t mention Santa, Elves, or anything else (BAH, HUMBUG)

The Posts of Christmas Present

We are closing out the year with some posts from the team to interest Data Management and Data Protection professionals!

• Graeme Simsion takes our 12th Author slot. (He’s out of sequence, but just in time for people to buy some of his non-data books as stocking fillers)
• The recording of our Webinar on Data Competencies is published
• Katherine O’Keefe shared some thoughts about a Data Bill of Rights in the US.
• Katherine also wrote last month about how the DPC has made it clear that training, unlike debates about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, should not be just an annual tradition.
• Carey wrote about how dogs have better data privacy rights than humans in New Jersey
• And I had a December missive in TDAN.com about Data Ethics and why the current level of thinking isn’t going to solve the problem

Another Year Over…

We have all made it through a fast paced year. The nature and scale of data change in even the smallest organisation has been intense.

To borrow a model from Team Building, 2020 was about STORMING into the world of Connected Work in response to the pandemic. 2021 was the year of FORMING and NORMING as we began to deal with the practicalities of distributed work. This was particularly true as the importance of the unglamorous things like data governance, process documentation, metadata definition, and training for the data life skills we need in organisations came to the fore.

The Post of Christmas Yet to Come

What do we have to look forward to in 2022? I’m not in the predictions business, but 2022 will be the year when we get through the Norming phase of the societal data transformation and begin to move to the PERFORMING stage. Right now there is a huge confusion about terms like Data Literacy, Data Ethics, and (dare I say it) Data Transformation in the market. This will begin to shake out slowly as people realise (again) that data and digital transformation is about more than putting in new technologies. It means having to get your head around fundamentals of data management and manage data as a business asset. I discussed this with the All Ireland Business Foundation recently.

Castlebridge will be doing its bit to promote the Norming so we can all get Performing in 2022.

• DataEducation.ie will continue to roll out flexible approaches to data skills and competencies training, with new courses coming in Q1 2022 and beyond. We will also be rolling out in-house courses in a range of data disciplines. For the New Year, anyone using the discount code “Nollaig21” will get a 15% discount on courses. This is only available until the 21st of January!
• Our public instructor led training continues in 2022 with courses starting in early January! Check out the details here!
• We continue to advise and support clients across all sectors on data strategy, data governance, and data protection. If you are considering a data transformation project in 2022, get in touch to see how we can help get your ideas on target!
• We continue to work with our academic research partners to bring industry insights and academic rigour together!

Blog highlights coming up in 2022:

• A look at Zimbabwe’s Data Protection law
• A deeper look at data competencies and developing data competency models
• A rant about data strategy and how it’s not the same as “more software”.

We look forward to sharing more thoughts and actionable insights with you in 2022!

It’s Behind You

Of course, the first bit of performing we’ll be helping with in 2022 will (hopefully) be the Wexford Pantomime Society’s production of Aladdin in the National Opera House. It was planned for January but events have conspired against it.

There are some pun-riddled Christmas traditions that I think are worth preserving. Here’s the 2021 Panto that was live streamed in January of this year.