We help you understand your business better by increasing the overall quality and ‘trustability’ of your data and surfacing it in an intuitive, usable way. Here’s some of the typical customer challenges we see.
BI - Element - Siloed Ops
Siloed operations mean we have no unified view of performance.
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BI - Element - Trust
Lack of data quality and governance creates intelligence faultlines – we don’t trust it.
False
BI - Element - Reports
Reports are disposable: we create them to answer a question, then abandon them.
False
BI - Element - Timescales
We can’t make data available in the timescales required.
False
BI - Element - Locked
Our data is inaccessible/ value is locked into structured formats.
False
BI - Element - Formats
We present data inconsistently, in unfriendly formats.
False
BI - Element - Value
We generate increasing amounts of data, but we don’t drive enough value from it.
False
BI - Element - DS
Our data scientists are doing cool stuff – but we can’t see it.
False
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Empty Space BI
Empty Space
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Diagram_Our resources and capability - BI
Our resources and capability.
The scale and skills of our talented teams (and where to find them).
We engage closely with your business to understand your objectives and data use cases. Working with your teams and stakeholders, we break down siloes and merge datasets across different business units to build and establish a single, centralised source of truth for more accurate analysis and planning.
Our strong design principles for dashboards ensure we optimise for rapid insight. We deliver engaging, concise and compelling visualisations, backed by performant, scalable and logical data models on a platform that supports all levels of data maturity and complexity.
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BI - SelfServe
BI - SelfServe
Self-service BI.
Our BI consultants can also empower you to rapidly develop, consume and share reports, dashboards and visualisations without intervention that accurately reflect the health and success of your business operations.
We design versatile models that explore large volumes of diverse data for potential trends in low-code and no-code environments, enabling you to create personalised/ custom reports and visualisations on-demand.
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Value Proposition
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What it means to you table - BI
How we work and what it means to you.
How it work & what it means to you.
How we work.
What it means to you.
End-to-end reporting infrastructure with optimised pipeline between data sources and business insight delivery.
All-in-one reporting engine that kickstarts your intelligence journey.
Real-time insight and BI systems that surface live metrics.
Enables operations use cases that require actionable and instant insight, beyond the traditional strategic and backwards-looking focus. Empowers swift and efficient operational responses.
End-user focused, intuitive frontend design that emphasises business communications quality.
The route to insight is engaging and accelerated, crucial in driving a data culture in your organisation.
Strong links into the Ascent Data Science practice.
Leverages a change mindset and advanced analytics capabilities to drive tangible business impact.
Part of a broad, mature offering that combines data engineering, consulting and data science with software development and design thinking.
Direct route to building compelling business services on top of your BI investment.
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IN ACTION
DATA - BI CaseStudy
ECB
Optimising player performance with data.
Proud to be the first Official Performance Insight Partner to ECB Women’s Cricket, Ascent delivers cutting-edge insight to ECB management and players that enables real-time performance tuning decisions in both long-term coaching and match series scenarios.
We identified and enhanced a set of data sources, including a centralised match footage hub, that would give the England Women’s Performance support team a 360-view of the medical, coaching, physiological, wellbeing and mental health-related factors that contribute to winning performances. Designing and building the big picture with impactful data is critical as it helps the team make more informed decisions on supporting players, understand the impact of health and wellness on performance, and optimise and consolidate training schedules.
Logo- Data - Case Study - BI Services
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Career Progression Services
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Empty Space BI
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Our customers.
We love what we do and we get to work with some of the sharpest minds in the brightest businesses: from smart home devices, space exploration and beer to manufacturing, finance, ecology and logistics.
Creating compelling omnichannel experiences from bar to browser.
BREWDOG
Optimising performance & support with 360° insight into the elite Women’s game.
ENGLAND & WALES CRICKET BOARD
Democratising data to engage new communities & protect the UK seabed.
THE CROWN ESTATE
Delivering the horizontal scale to expand into new medical research fields.
HANSON WADE
Improving experience & making life simpler for home automation customers.
HIVE
Bringing on-demand to the UK’s favourite TV listing and review platform.
RADIO TIMES
Reducing cost, accelerating innovation and attracting new talent in healthcare.
Organisations on a data-driven journey want to achieve value from their data, but what they are attempting isn’t really about digital, first and foremost — It’s actually about the necessity of transforming business models.
Download this whitepaper to learn how to get started on your data-driven journey, and discover the pillars that define a successful transformation.
Do you know who owns the data in your organisation? Should you care?
Blog
Branka Subotic, Ascent’s Principal Data Consultant looks at the various data roles within an organisation and the business-wide responsibility to make data-led business decisions.
data ownership, data owner, data steward, technical strategy, data & analytics, data-driven, data custodian
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2021-12-12T00:00:00Z
Do you know who owns the data in your organisation? Should you care?
Data is arguably the biggest asset an organisation owns - but who’s ultimately responsible for it? Ascent’s Principal Data Consultant Branka Subotic considers the roles and responsibilities of data ownership.
Have you ever sat in a meeting with your Board or executive team when a really obvious question was asked that nobody truly had an answer for? Do you recall an uncomfortable silence followed by a senior leader providing a half-baked response (whilst two other senior leaders frantically messaged their teams)?
If you do (and you are not in the minority!) - ask yourself this: who should have had the answer? Who owns data in your organisation?
Data should drive ALL business-critical decisions.
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted (and is still disrupting) most industries. For some, it has led to a complete standstill for few months, and an urgent need to re-finance and cut costs. For others, it has meant a boost in sales and unprecedented growth.
Regardless of where your business stands in between these two extremes, you can say that it has taught us all how important it is to have accurate, readily available data that informs critical business decisions. Often, this is data which describes productivity per location, per sector, per type of product, per team, per employee, or it simply indicates the actual number of products sold, customers engaged, or employees in the company.
Let’s run with the latter example. If you ask HR how many employees there are, you will get a figure including everyone who has a contract with the company, permanent staff as well as contractors, but also staff who are on unpaid leave, special leave, sabbatical, secondment, etc.
If you ask Finance, you will get a number that reflects staff on the payroll. Therefore, the answers to the same question from HR and Finance will be different – but both can be considered ‘correct’. But which answer should you use to drive your business?
Governance and trust: data roles.
Data and analytics assets exist everywhere across an enterprise and vary in nature – and not all data and information is equal. Gartner suggests establishing a trust-based governance model that:
supports a distributed ecosystem of data and analytics assets
acknowledges the different lineage and curation of these assets, and
assists business leaders in making contextually relevant decisions with greater confidence.
The last point above is key - it all comes down to context. If we consider our earlier example, the scenario might be that the CEO is asking how many employees the company has because they need to decide how many they will furlough. Providing this kind of answer is only possible if the ‘People’ data in this company has a single owner who has a framework in place to steward the relevant data sets and deliver context-specific, relevant answers to organisational questions.
Which brings us to data governance roles. There are various approaches to the delineation of responsibilities around data but one of the simplest (and therefore my favourite), is the distinction between Data Owner, Data Steward and Data Custodian. You can read vast amounts of material on each of these roles from either Gartner or DAMA, but, succinctly, this is what they mean to me:
A Data Owner is the person accountable for the specific and logical groups of data assets (in our example, all data sets that constitute ‘People’ data), whether generated by the company or 3rd party (e.g., postcode database). The Data Owner can be a member of the executive team or a senior manager with delegated authority and a vested interest in ensuring data is managed appropriately.
A Data Steward is responsible for maintaining specialist knowledge about their data area, putting into place acceptable use of this data, maintaining necessary records about the data (metadata) and is consulted for operational advice regarding any changes about the acquisition, transformation, storage and consumption of this data (where consumption includes both human and system usage). They implement data strategy enterprise-wide for their data area and are also responsible for performing any transformations required for their data assets.
A Data Custodian is responsible for a set of data. Data Custodians are essentially data administrators who focus on the ‘how’, rather than the ‘why’ of data management. Data Custodians must communicate and collaborate with the Data Steward regarding any technical activities that impact the data within the Data Steward’s scope.
Here’s how that looks in practice:
Data governance ensures that the right people are assigned the right data responsibilities. It is mostly about strategy, roles, organisation and policies, whilst data stewardship is all about the execution and operationalisation of said policies for the benefit of the whole business, making sure that the data is accurate, in control, and easy to discover and process by the relevant parties.
NB: It is very important we do not mix Data Stewardship in any way with the business function within which the Data Steward happens to sit. The role they perform is company-wide.
In our previous example, the Data Steward for the ‘People’ data may well sit in the HR department, but they are responsible for the single source of truth for a total number of employees, staff demographics, contact details, licences/ qualifications and their validity, etc. Similarly, the Data Steward for the ‘Customer’ data could easily sit in the Commercial department, but their remit is to manage a complete and accurate set of customer data for the whole of the business.
“So what?”, you say. Why should you care about all of this?
It all comes down to a single source of truth. When your Executive asks a question, you want to make sure there is a single party responsible for getting to the answer, using a managed, quality-checked data source or sources. You want to prevent different parties going off on a tangent trying to answer the same question in silos, using locally produced data sets that are not quality checked, resulting in different answers, delivered in different formats with a range of differing assumptions.
What is good is to start asking this question today (not next week, or the week after). The longer you let the business evolve without a clear answer to who the data owners are, the longer you will lack clarity about your business, its performance, and clear lines of accountability.
So see your data for the asset that it is: go ahead, be brave, ask the question. And if you need a hand, the Ascent team is here to help you every step of the way!
Branka Subotic
Principal Data Consultant
Ascent
A strategic thinker, Branka is passionate about data, specialising in strategy and transformation. Branka’s primary role at Ascent is to help customers turn data into insight to support operational decision-making, having established her credentials in a mission-critical context: leading key alliances and advanced analytic teams in European air traffic management for over 15 years.
Branka is also a Chartered Engineer with a PhD in air traffic management, an MSc in aeronautical science and an MEng in air transport engineering.