Data quality

This past week, I attended the National Health and Human Services Summit in Arlington, VA. Over the past three years, I have met and worked with many state Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies across the United States. Through my work with these agencies, I have encountered a common goal is “improving outcomes.” What this means is ensuring constituents are served in the best possible way, and the focus of this conference was no different. 

Last week, I, along with two other members of the Experian team, took our talents to sunny San Diego to soak up some knowledge and spread some insight at the Enterprise Data World (EDW) conference. The conference was packed with some of the best and brightest representatives from organizations across the U.S. and around the globe. 

Last week I attend the Utility Analytics Summit in Irvine, CA, which was sponsored by Southern California Edison. I’ve been to a lot of data conferences in my day, (let’s just say this was not my first rodeo) however, it was my first foray into the world of utilities. What I noticed right away was that data-related challenges run rampant regardless of the industry. The analysts, data scientists, and engineers that I met at the summit were all struggling with similar issues that organizations in finance and government have been challenged with for years.

Data lineage charts the full life cycle of data: the path from its creation through consumption, and everything that happens along the way. For organizations interested in achieving strong data management programs, data lineage is a key component. It provides a more granular view of your data, allowing you to gain insights from the ways in which data is manipulated and transformed from collection to application.

For years, financial services organizations have competed for consumers’ business. This competition has historically been based on the size of these organizations’ branch networks and the convenience of their branch locations. With the preference many consumers had for interacting face-to-face with tellers, ease of access to financial accounts, financial services, and personal advice depended on proximity to a branch office. 

It’s no secret that we live in a digital era. Government agencies are taking significant steps to embrace digital transformation. As citizens come to expect the same kind of ease and convenience in their dealings with public sector agencies as they experience with their favorite retail brands, agencies are looking to digitize more services. Applying for or renewing important documents like driver’s licenses and license plates are now services available online. With a highway full of self-driving vehicles being more of a near-distant vision than a far off possibility, the pace of digital transformation will continue to accelerate to keep up with technological advancements.

Welcome to Share your success, a bimonthly series of interviews featuring successful people within the Experian family. I wanted to take a closer look at those who are thriving in our company to keep a pulse on everything happening in the data quality space from the people who know best: the professionals who live and breathe all things data management day in and day out. I recently sat down with Regional Sales Manager, Kendra Keegan, to get to know her better and learn about the path that led her to where she is today.

New Orleans was the site of this year’s Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing Users Group (OUUG) Conference. The shift from Scottsdale, Arizona and the interest around the selected topics generated the largest attendance in the conference’s history! The tracks for focus were around Customer Billing, Meter Data Management, and Workforce Asset Management. This was our first year sponsoring the event, and we were pleased to be met with genuine interest, as well as a strong following for Experian swag!

Think of classic combinations: peanut butter and jelly, summer and beach days, mornings and coffee. Though the components that comprise these pairings do just fine on their own, they are somewhat incomplete without the other. That’s how you should think of data governance and data quality. 

As many states continue to undergo customer relationship management (CRM) system modernizations, one key driver is open data. Open data is the process of granting information access to the public, which includes converting data to a format easily consumable by citizens. What data are we talking about? Maybe your citizens are interested in Census data, the location of available retail parcel space, or the trending price of produce. The topics vary widely and states need to figure out how to support all of it in a scalable and organized way. If residents can access that data online in an easy-to-consume fashion, that’s one less person calling into the agency or adding to the in-person queue at your office. As the trend sweeps across the public sector, more and more agencies are trying to figure out how to grant access to open data.