Weekly Dose of Data Clarity - 15

Our Data MVPs

What's Hot ☕️

Buzzword - federated database architecture 🤝

Data Strategy - CIO Survey Results 🏛

Back to the Ballgame ⚾️

Thursday, March 28th

---

What's Hot ☕️

Introducing DBRX: A New State-of-the-Art Open LLM

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks. "We're excited about DBRX for three key reasons: 

1. It beats open source models on state-of-the-art industry benchmarks.

2. It beats GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks, which should accelerate the trend we're seeing across our customer base as organizations replace proprietary models with open source models. 

3. DBRX uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, making the model extremely fast in terms of tokens per second, as well as being cost effective to serve. (Source: newswire.ca)

Bringing Data Into the Adobe Environment Just Got Easier

Adobe Summit 2024: 5 Top Takeaways from the Digital Experience Conference (So Far!)

Adobe’s new Federated Audience Composition solution makes enterprise data – amassed in warehouses and specialist data stores – actionable, so it can augment real-time customer journeys while minimizing data copy.

In other words, Adobe is letting customers keep their data residing in a platform like AWS, Databricks, or Snowflake. But, at the same time, enabling them to tap into the intelligence and draft off it. (Source: cxtoday.com)

Snowflake invests in $115M funding round of Observe, a data observability startup

“At Snowflake we believe there’s no such thing as an AI strategy without a data strategy,” said Stefan Williams, VP Corporate Development & Snowflake Ventures. “Observe recognised this from the outset and built a data company. Our team has worked closely with Observe as a partner since the company’s founding and with this investment, we’re bolstering that relationship and emphasizing our belief in Observe as the company enters its next stage of rapid growth.” (Source: techfundingnews.com)

---

Beyond the Buzzword 🤝

A federated database architecture is described in which a collection of independent database systems are united into a loosely coupled federation in order to share and exchange information. (Source: see below) 

federated database architecture

For the first use of the phrase, Wikipedia steered us towards this 1985 paper, A Federated Architecture for Information Management. (Source: dl.acm.org/)

---

CIO Whitepaper: Data architecture and strategy in the AI era 🏛

From the paper, "Although not essential to AI development, federated data strategies enable data understanding at an enterprise scale and accelerate business decisions by putting them in the hands of those best equipped to use them in an agile and flexible manner unfettered by reliance on centralized IT". (Download at Cloudera.com)

---

Reshaping Major League Baseball with Biomechanics Data ⚾️

Biomechanics data rules! You might not be interested in the game, but it's amazing to see what's being done with data in Major League Baseball. (Source: databricks.com)

Here's more, from Google Cloud:

Let us know what you think! We want some feedback to make this newsletter better for you.

---

Want this weekly dose of data clarity delivered to your inbox?

Subscribe on LinkedIn

Weekly Dose of Data Clarity - 14

Driving Data Quality

What's Hot 🔥

Gartner Magic Quadrant - Augmented Data Quality Solutions 🤖

Buzzword - data washing 🧼

Solar Eclipse Map & Data 🌔

Salt in your diet 🥨

Thursday, March 21st, 2024

---

What's Hot 🔥

Reddit set for hotly anticipated debut after pricing IPO at top of range

The San Francisco, California-based company priced its initial public offering (IPO) at the top end of the $31 to $34 range it had marketed earlier. The IPO valued Reddit at $6.4 billion and raised $748 million for the company and its selling shareholders.

"The real news is going to be after the first earnings call - where are they headed, what are the results looking like, what changes are they going to make," said Reena Aggarwal, director of the Georgetown University Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. (Source: reuters.com)

Google to IBM: How big tech giants are embracing Nvidia’s new hardware and software services

However, GTC is never complete without industry partnerships. Nvidia shared how it is evolving its work with several industry giants by taking its newly announced AI computing infrastructure, software and services to its tech stack. Follow the link for a rundown of key partnerships: (Source: venturebeat.com)

ESG fraud is a growing risk for Canadian organizations, KPMG poll shows

"The fact that stakeholders are demanding accountability for ESG performance is a positive factor for driving change, but unfortunately it can motivate – and already is motivating – some individuals or teams within organizations to misrepresent or inflate their sustainability and financial metrics for corporate or personal gain," says Becky Seidler, a partner in KPMG in Canada's forensic and dispute advisory practice. (Source: newswire.ca)

---

Informatica Tops Report on AI-Driven 'Augmented Data Quality' 🤖

The research firm defines augmented data quality solutions as providing "a set of capabilities for enhanced data quality experience aimed at improving insight discovery, next-best-action suggestions and process automation by leveraging AI/machine learning (ML) features, graph analysis and metadata analytics."

Use cases include:

• Analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning development

• Data engineering

• Data and analytics (D&A) governance

• Master data management

• Operational/transactional data quality

---

Beyond the Buzzwords 🧼

Inspired by this week's survey results from KPMG on ESG fraud, the buzzword is, 

 data washing

Ms. Seidler says the survey findings underscore the need for organizations to implement strong controls that properly address ESG fraud. ESG fraud can take many forms, such as falsifying carbon offsets in ESG reporting, greenwashing and other types of data "washing", misusing ESG grant funds, breaching ESG regulations and bribery and corruption, for example. 

---

The 2023 and 2024 Solar Eclipses: Map and Data 🌔

This map uses datasets from several NASA missions. The eclipse data were calculated by visualizer Ernie Wright using elevation information from SRTM, lunar topography from LRO, and planetary positions from the JPL DE421 ephemeris. The lead visualizer, Michala Garrison, used Earth imagery from NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation to create the terrain map. Likewise, nighttime Earth imagery from NASA’s Black Marble were used along the path of the 2024 total solar eclipse. (svs.gsfc.nasa.gov)

---

Tips to reducing salt in your diet, for heart health 🥨

• try adding flavour to your food with herbs and spices, black pepper, garlic, chili or lemon juice instead of salt

• limit the amount of salt you add when cooking and eating – try tasting your food before adding any extra salt to your meals

• check food labels – look for products with green and amber colour-coded labels on the front of the packaging

• choose lower-salt foods by checking the salt content on the back or side of the packaging

• try low or reduced-salt versions of foods and sauces – for example, low salt soy sauce and stock cubes

• buy tinned vegetables, pulses or fish in water instead of brine

• eat salty foods less often or in small amounts – for example, cured meats and fish, cheese, olives and pickles

• have healthier snacks, such as plain rice cakes, fruit, vegetable sticks or unsalted nuts

• be aware that some dissolvable tablets, such as painkillers, vitamins or prescription medicines, may be high in salt – speak to your GP before changing any medicines (Source: nhs.uk)

---

Want this weekly dose of data clarity delivered to your inbox?

Subscribe on LinkedIn

How to Get Strategic Alignment with Buy-In

Good leaders become great leaders when they have strategic alignment throughout their organisation. When it comes to a data analytics program, “it’s ultimately about understanding the relationships between data, processes, technology and people, so your organisation can maximise its ability to generate the greatest business impact from data”. 

An organisation’s data strategy should first be designed to meet business objectives. Then, leaders need to establish consensus and ultimately get buy-in by "managing the cooks in the kitchen". So essentially, to achieve a strong strategic alignment, people must work collaboratively, under a clearly articulated vision, with the data they need to do their best work. 

In this blog we take a look at three influential roles within an organisation and what they need to reach those objectives. 

• Strategic Sponsor

• Data Champion

• Team Member
  

BONUS

Visualising Strategic Alignment

5 Tips on How to get Buy-in

---

Do you tend to confuse strategy vs. tactics? First take a look at,

Maintaining a Strategic Mindset

---

How Alignment Helps People Do Their Best Work

Strategic Sponsor

The strategic sponsor is responsible for setting the business objectives. In addition to the CEO, this role can be filled by CIO, CDO or business unit heads. They play a part in determining the overall mission and vision of the company. Their success lies in evangelising, ‘what they are shooting for’ so it’s clear and understood.

They need to maintain strategic direction and validate their objectives, in addition to the people part. To make this happen, high-level, accurate data from cross-functional teams (the ‘fifty-foot view’) gives them access to tools that calculate historical, real-time and predictive results.

Here are some examples of what a CEO would need to stay on track:

• Structural data: purchase order records, production or inventory logs, financial statements

• Unstructured data: reviews, testimonials, interviews, customer calls

---

A good leader truly lives up to the company’s mission and values as an act of integrity. Persistent reiteration of the company mission and values should be a core part of the company culture at every level as a top-down approach. Clearly communicating the mission and values from day one, and through every interaction with employees and customers, will help enlighten and hone this. - Branislav Vajdic, HeartBeam Inc.

---

Data Champion

The Data Champion is responsible for advancing data program initiatives. In addition to the CIO, this role is often filled by Directors of Data Science or Business Intelligence and other Managers. Their success lies in determining what bets the team will place to reach business objectives and ensuring people have the data they need to make this happen.

Often situated in a central role, they play a part in championing a data program whereby people are motivated to provide input on what they need to do their best work. A CIO would need access to data systems that pair program benchmarking and timelines with resource and budgeting analysis.

Here are some examples of data a CIO would need to maintain momentum:

• Business intelligence - financial, revenue, operational

• Infrastructure - IT systems, network and cloud usage

• Resource Management - time and equipment allocation

Team Member

In addition to the IT Manager, a Team Member can be an Enterprise Architect, Data Scientist or Business Relationship Manager (there are many more). Team Members are responsible for delivering tangible results by gaining insights from the data they work with every day.

In collaboration with the Data Champion, they need to take those ‘bets’ and create a future state. This can be done by a series of decisions that are made with the help of insights from various data systems. A significant part of the role is to communicate their needs for access to timely and reliable data that provides the necessary granularity.

Here are some examples of data a Team Member would need for better decision making:

• Customer data

• Sales growth

• Systems management

• Storage solutions

---

Visualising Strategic Alignment

Visualising Strategic Alignment within a Data Program

---

5 Tips on How to get Buy-in

The people part is an important piece of alignment. For this to work, business objectives need to be clear and a series of bets need to be placed. Then, regularly revisit these 5 tips to maintain buy-in.

1. Return to your Why and reiterate

2. Respect everyone’s time

3. Listen to people’s feedback for ongoing improvements

4. Earn Trust in the Data - better, not more data

5. Identify what everyone needs to do their best work

Get a Minimum Viable Strategy

It’s important to have a strategy you can quickly turn into action.

Starting with a MVS, tactics can be planned in alignment with business goals.

Reach out now