After the room starts to empty and the slide deck has been survived and is closed, the real questions begin. They’re often the ones that don’t come through in the Q&A mic queue, they come at the end of the session when you are packing away, or naturally in conversation during a coffee break or emailed later with a subject line like: “Just a quick one…”
Here are a few thoughts from those conversations, some of the questions which we have all had (I think), and the ones I’ve been having with myself ever since.
1. “How do we even start these conversations when IT holds the keys to everything?”
You start by making it explainable. Your pitch. Your narrative, The story. The outcome.
If your data strategy or architecture can’t be explained to someone in leadership without drawing five boxes and a shared drive metaphor, you’re not ready to roll it out. That’s not a criticism, it is a reality. You may well be the smartest person in a room. You don’t have to show it. That’s why you are paid,
Rewrite it. Break it down. Or better yet, don’t go it alone. We are often terrible communicators. Work with your comms team or find someone who will ask questions. My friend and colleague Megan is excellent at this. Find the person who can turn technical precision into clear narrative.
2. “It can’t be done in isolation.”
Exactly.
Data transformation and the true power of business intelligence requires transparency and engagement. Collaborative building.
Bring in your service leads, your frontline staff, governance, people that like spreadsheets. Some of the best resources you have aren’t in your IT structure, they’re in your organisation. Hiding in plain sight.
Also remember that much of the data in systems, as terrible as it may be, is years and even decades of work by officers who have delivered frontline services, kept communities safe, potholes to a minimum, and undoubtedly strived for improvement in doing those things. That terrible data, we should be immensely proud of. For the stories it tells us and the richness. It may be slightly abstract to frame it as such but it is data with character.
3. “Use what you’ve got.”
There’s a tendency to look externally, hire consultants, buy platforms, implement ‘solutions’. But often the biggest leap forward comes when we actually look at what we’ve got. Explore your own data estate. Be clever with it. Migrate it to a SharePoint site, create an agent with the context and outcomes you are looking for and add it to the site to allow you to surface the truth within it.
Ask questions. What’s on that old drive? Who knows how that dataset evolved? Is it redundant?
Your latent resource isn’t always technical. It’s people with memory, context, judgment.
4. “Understand your data.”
Obvious, right? But we often skip this because it sounds too big, too messy, too unclear. A couple of pieces of advice that really helped us out, from getting it wrong and trying to be clever many times before:
- Try taking it offline. Literally, print it out. Stick it on a wall. Bring the team in. Start pointing at things. What does this field mean? Who uses it? What’s that acronym again?
- Get out of your office. You’ll learn more from a 20 minutes of talking to teams directly than trying to make sense of the data yourself.
- Create, curate, or find an environment that allows you to work effectively. Again, this sounds obvious, but sometimes you can’t force it.
Understanding doesn’t always start in a dashboard. Sometimes it starts on a meeting room floor with a slice or two of pizza. Sometimes it is in the halogen glow of a coffee shop. Often times the unlocking of a problem or the birth of a creative solution or ideation it is the marination of a conversation that comes when you aren’t thinking about it. On a run. Staring out the window on a train ride. Reading a book. When your mind has wandered when you are supposed to be listening to someone having a conversation in real life.
5. Why the Renaissance theme?
Because despite the fluorescent lights and forms-based platforms, there’s something alive here.
This isn’t quite the Age of Enlightenment, but there are parallels.
Innovation. Experimentation. Collaboration. Energy.
The public sector, government might not feel like the cultural centre of the universe. But right now, there are pockets of real thought, creativity, and rebuilding happening all across it.
We’re not waiting for permission anymore.
We’re picking up the tools we’ve already got, asking better questions, and when we get it right unlocking real insight.
That feels like a renaissance to me.
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