Start With the Data

Process is the picture on the front of the jigsaw box; data are the interlocking pieces.

Understand each piece, what it represents and how it relates to the others, and the picture begins to emerge. Get the data wrong and no amount of process modelling will make the pieces fit.

That is why I tend to start with data when requirements, processes or organisational structures are still evolving. Processes can be redrawn, responsibilities can move and systems can be replaced. The underlying business facts are usually more stable.

Change a complaints process and the workflow may look completely different. The underlying concepts remain recognisable: customer, complaint, issue, date, communication, decision and outcome.

Understand those relationships and much of the process begins to reveal itself.

Where That Thinking Came From

My approach has changed with the technology, but its foundations were formed surprisingly early.

I started working with data in the mid-1980s, when information often had to be assembled from paper records, postcodes, census data, county boundaries and early digital files before it reached professional statisticians for analysis.

That taught me to see data first as a representation of something in the real world — not simply something stored in a database.

Since then the tools have moved through mainframes, databases and distributed systems to cloud platforms, APIs, data lakes, GIS, Python and modern analytics.

The Tools Change. The Questions Persist.

Whatever the platform, I keep coming back to the same questions:

Follow the Whole Chain

Working across architecture, migration, modelling, governance and delivery has meant following data through most of its lifecycle.

I am less interested in promoting a particular technology than in understanding that whole chain: how data is created, how meaning is preserved, where quality can be lost and how information can be made useful without losing sight of the reality it is supposed to describe.

From Thinking to Practice

Principles are useful. Applying them when the terrain gets messy is where experience matters.

Over the years I have accumulated patterns, tools, shortcuts, warning signs and the occasional scar from finding out what does not work.

I have collected these as my Practitioner Sherpa: practical notes from the terrain rather than a prescribed route through it.