Rage in the data cage

Many of you will be familiar with our popular series of blog posts and White Paper on the Data Zoo which explores a number of generic behaviours people exhibit towards data.

This post explores the effects on data behaviours when people are put into different teams (cages).

Are you playing on the pitch?

There have been pages of newspaper coverage and hours of debate devoted recently to England’s poor performance at the World Cup in South Africa. This has prompted a timely post from guest blogger Rhys Jones of Teamfactor which is also relevant to many business situations:

Reinventing the wheel

I’ve come across a few examples recently where people either have, or have nearly, re-invented something that already existed in an organisation.

This can be termed “re-inventing the wheel”. Clearly, such activities would be a waste of resources, but what was the nature of the problems, and how could they be avoided?

Is there stormy weather ahead?

As a facilitator I’ve worked with a wide range of teams from those planning the strategic future of the company through to small teams trying to solve their day to day issues. I find the way teams work fascinating and like a lot of people in the UK I’m curious to see how the new coalition cabinet manage to sort out their differences.

To shed some light on the development of teams we’re delighted to have a guest blogger, Rhys Jones from Team Factor. Rhys specialises in maximising the effectiveness of teams through workshops, facilitation and training and below he explains the process of team development

Radioactive gold data

A number of our posts and those of others, such as the excellent post by Jim Harris – “Predictably poor data quality” on the Dataflux Community of Experts site are exploring the concept of “behavioural data quality” – or people as part of the data quality problem.

A common concern is that people sometimes don’t treat data as if it matters, unless there is a direct impact on them. Building on the this area and our previous post “Would you allow this?” made me wonder what would happen if data were made of gold and radioactive?