Jill Campbell, Former Director of the ITSG Program Management Office at Belcan, speaks with Derek Strauss, Chairman at Gavroshe and CDO Magazine Editorial Board Member, about her background in IT and the historical progression of data leading to managing data as a product.
Belcan specializes in engineering, consulting, and technical services in the industrial, aerospace, and automotive industries.
Campbell begins with a sneak peek into her background as an IT professional and shares the story of data evolution. She recalls being in IT infrastructure when the discussion around managing data in a database structure started because of storage issues.
While IT was concerned about storing the big data in the beginning, business did not understand the need to care about it, says Campbell. Decades later, the volume of data is overwhelming and the business side does not know what to do with it, how to access it, and assess its accuracy, she notes.
This chaos leads to the business questioning IT about the data, which in turn, leads to the conflict of who owns the problem and who is supposed to be solving it. Therefore, as an organization, now the focus is on identifying how to solve data accuracy issues, along with data access and manipulation.
While aligning those things, data-as-a-product started to surface, says Campbell, and discussions around how to access, organize, and curate it for users to be able to ensure its accuracy started.
To address it the IT partners with the business to understand what the business wants to do with the data, and then help solve the data organizing issues with technology.
The challenge, according to Campbell, is figuring out which data is more accurate, which circles back to the data ownership, the origin of data, and who has entered the data. Identifying the real problem starts through the exercise of origination and curation of data, she notes.
Sharing an instance, Campbell states that Belcan provides employees to other organizations and there are various services that the employees are needed for. Therefore, identifying the total number of employees based on one certain identifier was a task because the employees are entered into different systems under different numbers.
In this scenario, it becomes challenging for the organization to take note of the total number of employees based on the systems, because it depends on what type of employee one is asking for.
Therefore, to identify data, one must be able to understand the definition, and that is where the partnership of business and IT must happen to identify the data. Campbell concludes by saying that this partnership leads to data curation and identifying data as a product.
CDO Magazine appreciates Jill Campbell for sharing her insights with our global community.