Data is a Product

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend the official launch of the Open Data Institute (ODI) at their HQ in Shoreditch, London. For the uninitiated, the ODI has been championed by founder of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and eminent data scientist Prof. Nigel Shadbolt with the aim to create a world-leading centre of open innovation for government, academics and businesses of all sizes. With support from the UK government of £10 million over 5 years, the ODI have wasted no time in recruiting a cracking leadership team including the founder of green supply chain pioneers AMEE (Gavin Starks) and my Open Data User Group colleague Jeni Tennison. The ODI have a few simple aims which can be summarised as: - Creating education programmes to train the next generation of data scientists. - Assist and advise the public sector on the best ways to release and use open data. - Work with small & large businesses to improve skills, foster innovation and boost economic gain in the field o

Hello there! As some of you may know, I'm a member of the Open Data User Group that's been set up to help the UK Government understand the requirements for more public owned data to be released to all. One of the most common requests received by us and various public bodies is for an open address file. Today, many organisations use Royal Mail PAF or other files from the likes of the Ordnance Survey. Most of these cost money and have various license conditions attached. On top of this, the fact that there are lots of alternatives is plainly confusing. Today, the Open Data User Group have called for the Open release of Royal Mail PAF, OS AddressBase Plus and the National Street Gazetteer to form the backbone of an open and accurate national address register for the UK. More information on our work can be found on the Guardian and the Governments' Open Data site. I'm sure this will kick off a fascinating debate and hopefully will lead to changes in the address da

So after 2 and a bit years as a Product Manager looking after some data products, I got the call to step up and manage a team. Exciting hey!? Well yes, being promoted is a fantastic thing and comes with obvious benefits for a career. But as a Product Manager, is this actually a good thing? Talking to a few people who've been through the same process, I found some contrasting views. Some people missed the day-to-day cut and thrust of managing a set of products, building requirements and dealing with issues. Others found the people management and less reactive approach as a really positive change.

Hi everyone! Now that the Olympics is over, I’ve been left with nothing to watch on TV.. until now! Being a fan of stuff like Lost, I thought I’d give ‘ Person of Interest ’ a go. Shown on CBS in the US; the first episode was aired here in the UK by Channel 5 on Tuesday. It’s got a good pedigree with people like Jonathan Nolan and J. J. Abrams involved and stars Jim Caviezel (the guy who played Jesus in that film about Jesus) and Michael Emerson (Ben from Lost). Now, I’m not going to review the show itself here.. All I’ll say is that Jim Caviezel wore an obviously fake beard, acted a little robotic and Michael Emerson had a fantastic fake limp. Anyway, the show is set in modern day America with an ex-CIA agent (Caveizel) being picked up by a strange Billionaire (Emerson) who offers him a job. The pitch went something like this: “Imagine if you knew that something bad was going to happen to someone. It could be a terrible accident or murder or something else.

This week, I attended the first meeting of the Cabinet Office's new Open Data User Group . This is a new body that has been set up to help advise the Government on which datasets to provide in an open form to the general public. In essence, it will look at which ones can achieve the greatest economic and social value for the most appropriate cost to the body that produces it (mainly the four trading funds that make up the Public Data Group ). I was very lucky to be chosen (from over 75 applicants) to represent big business and bring my take on product management, building the business case and of course the compliance and security issues around data to the table. I join some truly influential people on this Group and I'm delighted to be playing my part. I'll obviously keep using my blog to share my own personal thoughts on data and product management so it's again worth a quick mention that my views do not represent those of my employer or the ODUG. Anyway, I&#

Since starting this Blog I've been ribbed constantly by some friends that the title should be 'Data Are a Product' rather than Data is a Product. It goes back to the question on whether Datum is the singular and Data is the plural for what most people generally just call data. It was therefore nice to see this Wall Street Journal blog that tried to answer the question once and for all. Happilly for me, it seems to say 'who cares?' and just decides to use data for both singluar and plural. Now I'm a bit of a stickler for grammar (apart from this one example) so I'm obviously relieved that I won't be losing any more sleep over this conundrum.

Some of you may know me quite well and know a little about the company I work for. Yes, we deal with a lot of data and offer a lot of services around the intelligent use of data across an organisation. One of these is helping companies create what is generically known as a Single Customer View (or Single Citizen View in the Public Sector). I wanted to spend a little time looking at what a Single Customer View (SCV) is and what it could be in the future as the effects of Big Data enable us to do more.

Following on from my excited picture post last week, I've now digested the Government White Paper on Open Data: Unleashing the Potential. My thoughts are below and I'm sure they will be similar to the thoughts of many other people around the industry. For a nice run down, check out this article at the Guardian. In short, the White Paper gives an update on progress made so far and the plans for the future. One of the most significant things here is the apparent passion for the movement shown by Francis Maude MP. In fact, during his launch he spoke many times of his team of 'Guerrillas' and 'Zealots' who are running round Whitehall, encouraging their colleagues (apparently in many different ways) to get behind Transparency and take the risk. A few key points for you: Over 9,000 datasets have been made available on www.data.gov.uk . The site has been redesigned to make it easier to search for data and use it. Every department has now published it's Ope

I'm here at PA Consulting this morning with Francis Maude and all of the great and the good in the open data movement. I'll give a complete run down of the event later but just wanted to point out the excellent use of the alphabet in the the attendee list.

As part of my on-going quest to find out everything I can about Open Data, I've decided to dedicate 3 weeks of my annual leave to researching sources of Open Data in the Far East. I'll be slogging around Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam to locate the best Open transport stats, postal address files and maps that I can to bring back to the UK to build new products with. Actually, that's partly a lie. I am going to the Far East but I'm actually heading to beaches, temples and bars to find cultural enlightenment and cheap Pad Thai. So while I'm off, I thought I'd leave you with some interesting links to Open Data sources and stories from around the World. To start with, some interesting thoughts on why Open Data should be about more than transparency. This article also features detail on how UK Doctors have improved survival rates in heart surgery using Open data over seven years to the point that the UK is now leading Europe. The Doctor heading this up (Sir

Now, bear with me on this one! The whole analogy piece has been done before, so apologies if this one has already been done. I'm not plagiarising, it just occurred to me that this made sense. For some nice examples of stretching an analogy, check out Darth Vader as a Project Manager and Leadership Lessons from Captain Kirk . And yes, I do enjoy the odd Sci Fi movie now and again! Google Maps & Product Management It's all about scale. As a Product Manager, you need to be able to think about things on the macro and micro level. Now for the analogy... StreetView If you search for a location on Google Maps and use the StreetView application, you get a great look at where you actually want to be. Just in the same way that a Product Manager will focus on one task at a time. For example, I may need to write a presentation for an event: Great, let's focus on that. However, I'll also need to be thinking about the wider piece and how my presentation will fit in wit

Hello! Following up on my earlier posts about how free products like Facebook, Apps, loyalty cards and so on are less about benefiting you and more about generating marketing leads for the companies who supply these products and services to you; Google have launched something else for us all to enjoy. Thanks to Martin Eriksson (@bfgmartin) for the very pertinent Tweet: Google Drive was launched to much fanfare this week offering up to 5GB of online storage for free with additional storage available (up to 16TB for a monthly fee). For more on this, check out Wired . OK, so this is great right? 5GB of space to back up all of my pictures, important files and maybe some of my music? Where do I sign? Hold on though; before you sign up, think about what you're actually giving to Google. According to their terms and conditions (nicely described here alongside those of competitor services by ZD Net), you could be getting more than you're expecting. In essence, when you sub

I attended the 1st Big Data Insight Forum this week where organisations like Microsoft, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and Orange explained more about this 'revolution'. The take aways for me were quite simple. It's all about the 3 V's: Volume - the amount of data Variety - the types of data (text, social network updates, address, behaviour, pictures and so on) Velocity - the speed of collection, storage and analysis Simply put, Big Data is not really that new. It's all about analysis of data. The interesting bit is that, thanks to the falling cost of data storage and growth of analytical tools like Hadoop and Splunk, organisations can now get at more of the data that they used to ignore (data exhaust) and make decisions more quickly. The event was very useful in helping me to inform my decisions on how I can build future products (that while I may not describe them as 'Big') will use lots of different types of data and help users make decisions quickly.

Hands up anyone who’s exceeded 64Gb of music in their  iTunes  library (or other generic MP3 music service)? I’m guessing that it’s quite a lot of us.. Now, that’s a pretty big database of music. But what exactly is Big Data? How do you define Big Data? What has this got to do with a database about a dead  East Coast rapper ? In short, it has nothing to do with Biggie Smalls but is actually a fairly loose definition that is being used to describe the growth in the amount of data produced and analysed by organisations, governments and individuals and the difficulties that are being encountered in storing, using and analysing these large datasets. There’s now a growing market for suppliers of data storage, networking and analysis tools such as  IBM ,  Teradata  and  Google  who have the experience and capability to make sense of all of this information about shopping habits, Facebook status’, DNA sequences and the movements of Galaxies or Higgs Bosons. To give you an id

I know it's been a while since my last post. Don't worry! I haven't gone anywhere. I've just been busy with my day job and then relaxing for a couple of weeks after a manic product launch. While I get a new post written, take a look at what I've been up to at PublicTechnology.net .

A while ago, I wrote a post about how our use of social media can be advantageous in finding us special deals, helping us contact friends and find new jobs. In this post, I wanted to look at the other side of the coin. Namely, what do the companies offering us these free services and special deals get out of it? To start, let's look at one of the obvious and less technical uses of data products: Grocery Shopping! Shopping While this may seem rather simplistic, the use of shopping data linked to a loyalty card has been the clearest example of the power of data in creating strong product propositions. While many will talk about the potential of Facebook and Twitter (I'll come onto this in the future); the loyalty card has proven to be the best promotional tool available. So, we know that our shopping habits are collected when we use our Clubcard (Tesco), Advantage card (Boots) or our Costa Coffee card. The shopping habits of consumers have been tracked by supermarkets sin