On 30 September, the UK’s data protection regulator changed its name. The Information Commissioner’s Office – the ICO – became the Information Commission. If that sentence meant nothing to you, stay with me, because the thing it refers to affects every organisation that holds personal data, including yours. And if it meant something and gave…
Let me start by conceding the obvious. “Data governance” is a terrible name for something important. It sounds like a committee. It sounds like a policy document nobody reads, a SharePoint folder full of PDFs last opened in 2019, a meeting that could have been an email about a meeting. If it makes your eyes…
For most of the world the year turns in January. In our sector it turns now. September is when the planners come out, the resolutions get made – this is the year we finally sort out the thing that fell over last time – and the whole enterprise cranks back into motion with its familiar…
Every year, around the same time, a particular kind of tiredness settles over data teams across the sector. HESA season. The credibility reports, the quality rules, the fields that won’t reconcile, the evening someone loses trying to work out why the figures are forty students short. If you’ve lived through it, you know the exact…
Base rate neglect, the “99% accurate” test, and why a positive result often isn’t what you think Here is a question that has caught out more doctors than anyone in the medical profession would like to admit. There’s a disease that affects 1 in 1,000 people. There’s a test for it, and the test is…
Correlation vs causation, the ice cream that never drowned anyone, and the difference between “moves together” and “makes it happen” Here is a genuinely true fact. On days when more ice cream is sold, more people drown. The two rise and fall together with impressive reliability. Chart ice cream sales against drownings across a year…
Most institutions have one: the person who became the Power BI expert by accident. They were good at Excel, which in most teams is enough to get you volunteered for anything involving data. Someone needed a dashboard, they had a go, and it worked. Then they had a go at another one, and that worked…
Goodhart’s Law, the cobra bounty, and what happens when a measure becomes a target Somewhere in your house, possibly on your wrist right now, there may be a device counting your steps. Ten thousand a day is the number, and it is a perfectly reasonable stand-in for “move your body a bit more”. Right up…
A few years ago, Amazon quietly scrapped an AI tool it had built to sift job applications. The tool had been trained on ten years of the company’s own hiring decisions, the idea being that it would learn to recognise a good candidate the way Amazon’s best recruiters did. It learned something else. It taught…
Survivorship bias, the bombers that came home, and the data you never get to see “They don’t make them like they used to.” You have heard it, and you may even have said it, usually while admiring a solid old wooden dresser or a building that has stood for two hundred years. The craftsmanship was…
