What does the data team of the future look like?

The challenge of finding and retaining people with the right data skills needed to meet demand has existed for many years. With data usage becoming ubiquitous and AI and generative AI starting to be embedded into business processes, what should the data team of the future look like?

That was the subject under discussion at the recent Think Data for Government event. A common theme was the need for multidisciplinary teams, and creating roles to bridge the gap between techies or data specialists and everyone else.

Lisa Talia Moretti, digital sociologist at AND Digital, advocated for multidisciplinary data teams. She said most team members should have different skill sets because data shouldn’t just be located within statistics or engineering.

“Data is very often and always really intersected and has relationships with people in places,” she said. “Therefore, you often need individuals who are responsible for understanding those relationships that people have with the different kinds of technologies that they’re working on or the different processes and operations that are in place. And if you have a team of people that is only focused within that very technical side of things you really miss the human side of the data story. You really miss capturing the experiences. You really miss understanding the how and the why things are happening as opposed to just capturing the what is happening.”

Moretti said roles like her own, which examine social norms and behaviours in relation to new technology, are becoming more important.

“To understand those kinds of insights you need people like digital sociologists as well as digital anthropologists, who are really understanding that sort of cultural change within society,” she said.

The role of data stewards

Moretti also talked about the role of the data steward, which is responsible for managing an organisation’s social licence – the social reputation and relationship with the public and the people represented within their data.

“It’s about navigating those conversations with them so that you are always understanding how they feel about the data being collected. That they understand how their data is being used, that consent has been managed in a responsible and careful way. Data stewards also really important part of the team because they help you identify and manage your data estates in a bit more of a social way and through much more of a partnership lens. Understanding what kind of datasets you have access to within the organization, and where other kinds of partnerships could actually lead to extra value.”

For her part, Caroline Kempner, head of data transformation at the Department for Education (DoE), said changes were underway in the organisation’s data team. Kempner said she has become “a massive advocate” for coupling technical expertise with user centered design and focusing on products.

“Having content designers, user researchers, product owners, is something I’ve only experienced fully in the last two or three years and it’s made such a huge difference to the value of what we’re producing as a department for, in our case schools, local authorities and trusts,” she said.

Kempner also said there exists a need for someone who can interpret “between the technical and product people and the policy people who don’t understand anything – and why should they really? – about this data lifecycle. Part of our role is to explain that lifecycle and to get people to buy into why it’s so important…that you can trust very clever in architecture engineers, why product and user research is so important.”

Building high performance teams

Elsewhere, Charles Baird, chief data architect, Office for National Statistics (ONS), described the organization as data intensive, with pockets of industry and professionally leading expertise.

“The challenge of my job is to make that available across the organization and try and build it into a cross office function with the aim of both driving better data discovery and better use the data, communication, possibilities of data, so that we can make our data assets available both more extensively across the office and appropriately across government.”

Baird noted that getting technical skills and associated services is a challenge. As such, the ONS is  investing time and effort into building its own talent pipeline.

“We’ve got a well-stocked apprentice programme where we bring people in to learn to be data objects and data engineers and we’re hoping to use that to split that out,” he explained.

He also highlighted the challenges of building high performing teams.

“One of the things we don’t spend enough time on is the interactions of teams and especially on multidisciplinary teams where people don’t necessarily speak the same language. It’s really important to spend time on that interpersonal infrastructure.”

Baird said the ONS was “working out how we best communicate to people who are experts in the field, why we’ve done things like architectural design records and that kind of technical documentation but trying to broaden it out into a non-technical fit.”

Save the date! The next Think Data for Government is on June 5, 2024.