"Being a responsible data driver" - Section 6 of 7: THE DATA LITERACY DRIVING SCHOOL (free excerpts)

This is the sixth part of the chapter titled “The Data Literacy Driving School”, from the book “The Data Garden And Other Data Allegories”.

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Being a responsible data driver

“Now,” your driving instructor continues, “you’ve come a long way since your first lesson. You can comfortably control a data car and have shown that you are developing good navigational skills. You also now understand some of the pitfalls that can result in you going down the wrong data insight alley or that can completely prevent you from progressing. There is one last, important lesson, which I’ve brought you to this sorry road to explain.”

You’re a bit taken aback by your instructor’s kind words. You know that you’ve been making good progress, but didn’t realise you were so close to being ready to get your license. “Thanks, that’s great to hear. What is your final lesson?”

“This final lesson is something that even many experienced data drivers never seem to grasp; and yet, it’s so important for everyone on the road, if we all want to be able to go on many successful data journeys across this great and complex city of ours. The thing is, if you are a data driver, you are a user of these data roads, and it’s in your best interest for the data roads to be in good condition.” He nods towards the poor quality of the road surface in front of you. Turning to look at you again, he continues: “If you find problems with quality of the data road surface, you need to report it to the Data Quality Council. You’re just a data driver, so you can’t fix any of these potholes yourself, but if you also don’t notify the council, they won’t know about the problems and won’t be able to fix them.”

“But don’t the council have their own people, who go out and find and fix problems with the roads?”

“Yes, they do,” your instructor confirms, “but the city’s so big, they don’t have enough people to keep an eye on everything that’s going on, so could easily miss some really major data road quality problems, unless responsible data drivers report them. By using the data roads, you need to become a steward of the data roads, yourself. If you, and all other data drivers, don’t take responsibility and don’t play their part, then you can’t complain when you find the roads are unusable and you can’t get places.”

“OK,” you nod, “that makes sense. How do I report a data road problem to the council?”

“Fortunately, it’s quite easy nowadays. A few years back, they realised that part of the reason no-one was reporting anything to them was because they hadn’t made it clear how to do it. There’s a website and an app that you can use, and the council are starting to put signs up that give a few other options, too.”

______________________________


I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt. 

If you are interested in reading more, please do check the book out on Amazon:

  • The Data Garden on Amazon.CO.UK
  • The Data Garden on Amazon.COM

    • Thanks for reading!

    #data #datamanagement #datagovernance #dataquality #dataarchitecture #metadata #dataliteracy #allegories #metaphors #analogies #stories #storytelling 


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