Notting Hill Housing Group has completed a major master data management project with InforData Consulting to consolidate myriad data sources from across its operations and impose data standards on data input and usage. The four-month programme was completed in March 2014.
Before InforData Consulting was engaged, many of the business areas within NHHG had their own data reporting systems and business processes which did not always communicate with a central data repository, making much of the data inaccessible to other parts of the organisation. Added to this, a widespread reliance on manual reporting meant that too much time was being spent on reconciling data between different systems.
After having carried out an audit of NHHG’s existing data lifecycle, InforData created a matrix of data owners and interviewed key people to gain their support for the project and to prioritise their particular areas of concern. During this process, InforData found that while some people had a clear idea of what it would take to achieve the data governance goals, others assumed that it was a job for the IT department alone, rather than a task requiring a business process solution. In response to this, InforData put together a full communications package to convey the goals of the project clearly to the rest of the organisation.
After delivering the first phase of the initiative, InforData was then invited to develop a blueprint for NHHG’s solution architecture. By identifying the structures and behaviours of the problems discovered during the initial audit, InforData used NHHG’s existing technologies, applications (only suggesting new ones where absolutely necessary) and in-house skills to design a solution blueprint. This included solutions for data-cleansing tasks, issues of data quality and incorporated a built-in timeline and set of milestones.
Maggy Dean, project manager, Notting Hill Housing Group, said, “The InforData consultants were a pleasure to work with and had a wealth of data governance knowledge and experience. They really understood our legacy data issues, so we now have a clear roadmap of what we need to do to improve the quality of our data.”
