Talking data with Nicola Askham (The Data Governance Coach/Camelot) : Iron Carrot

Season 4 Episode 8

Welcome to Season 4 of the Law Firm Data Governance podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot, the law firm data governance specialist. I’m thrilled to have a new season of insights about working with information and data in law firms.

Data governance is the key to unlocking your law firm’s potential. But it’s not the only area of data activity that is important for your firm’s success. That’s why, in this fourth season, I’m pleased to share some information, questions, and top tips about the other areas you might want to consider.

Episode Transcript

CJ Anderson

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Law Firm Data Governance Podcast. This episode, I’m delighted to welcome Nicola Askham, who’s known as the Data Governance Coach. A little bit about Nicola, from what I understand it, before we get her to introduce herself, is that she helps organisations understand and manage their data better.

And for the last two decades she’s helped corporates to reduce costs and inefficiencies by providing coaching and consulting. But of course, she’s most known for her popular and amazing training courses, which give people the skills to make sure that data is used to solve problems and make better informed decisions, which is what data governance and this podcast is all about.

So welcome, Nicola, to the podcast.

Nicola Askham

Thank you for having me here. The opportunity to chat data governance with another data governance lover is wonderful.

CJ Anderson

Thank you. So, I’m going to jump straight into our questions because I’m dying to know this one. Can you tell me a bit about your career journey working with data and how you got to where you got to being the Data Governance Coach?

Nicola Askham

So, I think that like many people, I think I fell into data governance by accident, but that’s a long story in itself for another day. But I ended up talking to people about roles and responsibilities around data. And I’ll be really honest; people weren’t interested at all. But I’d been involved in the data warehouse project, and I’d been upset that people didn’t seem to care about the quality of the data.

So, I talked about roles and responsibilities and eventually went to a conference. It was actually a Master Data Management conference because I was assisting a master data project as well in my role and found out that what I was doing wasn’t, well, it was still fairly unusual in those days, but it had a name.

It was called data governance, which was amazing. The bank kept having restructures. So, I think where I really started to learn what worked and what didn’t, mainly by doing the wrong things. And then they had yet another restructure. And instead of it being a slightly different division that I could like learn from my previous mistakes and try again, my boss said to me, ‘yeah, I just don’t think we want to do data governance at the moment’.

We did what we needed to do to meet the regulatory requirements. And you know, you’re trying to do more than that. And there’s just not the appetite for it. So, we want you to be a business architect. Up until At that point in my career, I’d always done what the bank said to do next until I got the chance to make up my own role, which is when I started doing data governance. And it just really, I just suddenly had this light bulb moment that I really had found my thing and that perhaps it was the time to be brave and leave the bank that I thought I would probably stay at for life.

I shared my CV because I think LinkedIn existed in those days, but I hadn’t heard of it. I shared my CV with the one person in my network who was outside the bank, expecting him to say, ‘go and get a bit more experience or just knuckle down, do the business architect for a bit and you’ll be fine’, because I was like serious imposter syndrome. And of course he came back and said, ‘hope you don’t mind, I’ve shared your CV with my friends in Denmark. They run a Scandinavian data management consultancy and they’re looking to set up in the UK’. And I just go, oh.

So, I ended up working for this most amazing company, one big happy family of data geeks. It was just amazing. I would have, again, I probably would have stayed there for life, but obviously they withdrew from in the UK. And then years after that, they were actually bought by Deloitte. So, they don’t exist anymore. But it was such a wonderful place to learn how to be a consultant in data governance instead of just doing it on my own internally.

So, I left and joined another small consultancy before I got brave enough to work on my own. But I think working for both consultancies, I learned something really valuable, is that I feel quite strongly that wherever possible, you shouldn’t do data governance for your client. You should give them the capability to do it. So, I get that people need help. They don’t always have the capacity and the hands available to do it. But I think a lot of consultancies, and I think that probably what distinguishes you as well, as me, is that they go in and just take over and do it. And they’re not thinking about how do we hand this over, transition to BAU and really embed this in the business and give people the skills.

So, as well as acting as an interim data governance manager, then somebody rang me up and said, ‘do you do data governance training’? And I kind of went, ‘yes, I think so’. And then immediately panicked about how on earth did I create a training course. And I think that was such a light bulb moment for me. I was absolutely petrified. I didn’t sleep for about two weeks before the training course. One, getting it finished because I didn’t realize how much effort was involved in creating training. But two, about the idea of standing up in a room full of people, absolutely. petrified me.

And actually, I came across the photo randomly whilst looking for something else earlier this week and I actually put it on LinkedIn. So, 10 years ago was the first ever training course I did. It’s I can’t believe how young I look and no grey hairs, but it was that kind of, I started the morning absolutely a bundle of nerves. Out of the 10 people in the room, two of them were really excited that I was going to teach some data governance. And the other eight really didn’t want to be spending a day doing this thing called data governance. By the end of it, I had 10 people really enthusiastic and excited. And they had plans of what they were going to do. And it was just like this light bulb moment for me that I could actually help far more people get more data under control by doing the training than I could by rolling up my sleeves and being their interim data governance manager. So that kind of started this transition more to the training and coaching, which I absolutely love. I get to work with so many different people across so many different sectors. It’s really exciting.

CJ Anderson

It sounds amazing. And that’s a fantastic journey. I think that’s true of all of us. We kind of fall into data by accident and it becomes our thing because we realize it’s what fits us. I think the benefit of you having done the training and met so many people is that I can ask you this really gnarly next question, which is, what do you see as the biggest kind of opportunities and drivers for firms doing more or being able to do more with data?

Nicola Askham

I’m obviously an overly optimistic person when it comes to data governance. I think it solves so many problems. I think there’s definitely the cost side of things because every sector I’ve ever helped or spoken to has this, you know, there’s manual workarounds that people don’t realize are to do with data being not set up correctly, integrated properly, or it’s the wrong data or it’s not good enough quality.

So, there’s a huge amount of rework or data wrangling that happens in organizations. And I really think that That’s a really fabulous opportunity to reduce costs and inefficiencies in organizations by managing our data better. That impacts so much. I do think that AI is going to be a really amazing thing for law firms because a lot of information is available online now that wasn’t. Like case history and the like.

So instead of having to know and remember all the relevant cases or going and manually searching for them, you can use tools like AI to actually search and really speed up your research or, actually find things that perhaps you never would have done before. So, I think it’s going to make them more successful at what they do because they can do their research so much more thoroughly and well. So, I think if firms think about their data and manage it so much better, I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there for them.

CJ Anderson

Amazing. And I think what can law firms learn from other people? Is there one sector out there that’s doing more with data governance than any of the others?

Nicola Askham

Oh, that’s a good question. So, I would say that financial services and pharmaceuticals have traditionally been seen as the sectors doing more because their regulators required them to govern certain data. And I think that causes some of the problem is that not all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but it has led a number of companies in those sectors to say, well, we only need to govern this data to keep the regulator happy.

And now I’m finding that clients in both those sectors are now wanting to come at it because the data that was used for regulatory reporting purposes or drug trial, drug development processes were all tightly controlled, but other data wasn’t and they’re really missing these huge opportunities to perhaps automate, reduce costs, improve customer service experience, that kind of thing.

So that’s happening. So, I think, and I suppose that is perhaps the one thing that law firms could do. Because I think there’s always this feeling people go, what’s the bare minimum we can do? And I think, yes, you’d absolutely, as you know, have to start iteratively and roll out. But you shouldn’t be thinking of this is what’s the bare minimum we can do and stop. This is our proof of concept, our first phase, and then we roll it out.

So, I think that’s one thing is that, you know, once you, once you get it in, do it small, but keep rolling it out. Don’t stop when you think you’ve done the bare minimum. And I’m trying to think, I think what I’m finding really interesting now is that I’m helping a lot of organisations who have no regulatory requirement to do data governance. They’re doing it because they’ve understood that there’s perhaps a competitive advantage. If they understand their own organisation better, they can actually streamline their own operations, do what they do better.

And I’m seeing that across a number of different sectors, you know, from manufacturing, retail, really, really interesting to see how people are getting their head around this as something that actually is a good thing to do, not a have to do.

CJ Anderson

It’s interesting. I think for law firms, they’re in that place in some countries. There are now regulatory requirements coming into place around their data. So, this has come as a surprise. And then the desire to do something with AI has meant they’ve had to look a bit more about their data. So, it’s interesting to hear that regulation was the driver for a lot of the big companies or the ones that we perceive as doing it better to start with.

Nicola Askham

Yes, absolutely.

CJ Anderson

So, When we think about kind of barriers and opportunities for firms taking data seriously, are you seeing any themes or patterns in these barriers and opportunities?

Nicola Askham

I think one of the biggest things is people, well, if you went back, I don’t know, maybe not quite 10 years, but, you know, 7 to 8 years, people really didn’t think that data at all was exciting or valuable, even if you worked in a sector like financial services, where their product is only data, kind of thing.

But I would say, more recently, perhaps five years or so, people suddenly started realizing that perhaps data was an asset. But I still think that we’ve still got a long way to go in that way. So, I think people are realizing it’s something that we could use now. But initially, I think it was firms that were kind of, oh, how could we monetize our data? So, could we anonymize it and sell it on?

And then they’d suddenly go, oh, well, it’s really bad quality, or we don’t actually understand what we’ve got to. anonymize it and sell it on. But I think now I think it’s the AI is the thing that’s driving a lot of people to not perhaps take data seriously. Now, we know that means they should, but people don’t want to do the boring things. Unfortunately, our job title does sound like it’s boring. It’s data. Plus, we’ve added the governance word. Sounds like we’re just going to stop people doing things with our data. Whereas you and I know it’s all about enabling people to do things with their data.

And I think that is one of the big things is, one, we have a branding problem, but two, people now want to do things like the Gen AI, but they don’t want to do the foundation bit first. So I think that is that perhaps it’s both a barrier and an opportunity really, isn’t it? It’s that kind of people saying, yes, we want some of that. You know, we heard this other law firms, you know, automated this and using their own internal, I don’t know, co-pilot or their own internal ChatGPT to do these amazing things. We want to do that.

But if you haven’t got data governance in place, you don’t know what data you’ve got. If everything’s not documented correctly, it’s just going to be a disaster if you put Gen AI on it because there’s all these, doomsayers online and everything saying, we’ll all be out of jobs and everything. The people that’ll be out of jobs are the ones doing the repetitive manual jobs. But wherever you need human context, AI just isn’t there yet. I can’t see when it will be. So, you need to kind of realize that AI is a huge opportunity, but we need to get the data right, otherwise it will not make the right decisions.

And it needs that human context to understand our data and document it correctly; make sure we’ve got the right data. And I think that can be really an amazing thing. But understandably, that sounds lengthy and costly. Organizations don’t want to invest in that boring foundational bit. They want the automation, the efficiencies, the cost savings, and we’re done. Yeah, just hang on a minute. We want to do data governance first.

CJ Anderson

So, do you see an impact of AI in data governance itself? Or.

Nicola Askham

Yes, yeah. So actually, I’m smiling because you asking that question made me think of a presentation I did recently. And I’ve been using AI to create images for presentations because it’s fabulous because, you know, instead of hunting for something that might vaguely be right, you just tell it what you want the image to convey, and it creates something sometimes better than others. And I wanted to finish my presentation on the note that I think data governance is helping make the case for data governance even stronger than it ever was before. And I put a brief like that into ChatGPT and said, create an image that does this. And it has a person in a courtroom. standing there. And there’s all screens with all data governance and charts and data and everything. And somebody standing there making the case for data governance. And I just thought, it was brilliant. I used it in my presentation, and it got the point across, and everybody laughed.

So, I think that, you know, it’s helping us explain to people, you want this shiny, sparkly thing. We can help you do that. And we can help you do that probably quicker. and safer and get the right answers than you could without data governance, because you’re going to make loads of mistakes and waste a lot of money along the way if you don’t. And you’ll still have to come back and do data governance anyway.

CJ Anderson

Yeah, it’s definitely an enabling force for people taking data seriously.

Nicola Askham

Oh, definitely.

CJ Anderson

So, I’m going to end this conversation as I always do by asking what’s your final thought on data or data governance?

Nicola Askham

So, I think it’s probably you kind of mentioned it when you introduced me because I’m known for saying it quite a lot. But I think that, whilst yeah, absolutely data can help you save money and increase profits, all those kind of things, but I really like to think that we should be actually managing our data better so that we can use it to make better informed decisions and to solve real problems.

And I think, you know, really, perhaps it sounds like data governance can help world peace, maybe not. But we can solve real problems by understanding the data. And, actually having that understood and better good enough quality, we can use some amazing tools and other people’s skills to analyse and find answers to things that perhaps have been alluding us till now.

CJ Anderson

That’s a really great final thought. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me.

Nicola Askham

It’s been wonderful. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

CJ Anderson

Thank you for joining me for this Law Firm Data Governance podcast episode. I had a great time talking with Nicola about her work, her thoughts on data governance, hearing about other industries, and understanding that law firms aren’t so different or far behind after all.

If you liked this episode please share, like and review it so that more law firm leaders can learn about data governance and how to manage data in law firms effectively. Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any of this season’s data conversations with law firm thought leaders. Or you can head over to irconcarrot.com to get in touch with your questions and ideas for future episodes.