Bloom: Sophie Angenot
Sophie Angenot founded QuaData 7 years ago. From an innovative idea that became too big for just herself, she built a team. Now she's a reference when it comes to Data Governance and the human side of data. We certainly didn't expect data governance to be so interesting and engaging. 🤯
Too big an idea for one person
Sophie starts our conversation laughing: "My company, QuaData, helps clients with Data Governance. Even though that is my passion, I have to admit that the definition sounds very boring; the policy that an organisation has around data, how that is organised and what responsibilities are set for the different employees."
"I started doing business in 2014. Before that, I worked in a company that processed and sold data. The slogan 'Data is the new oil' came up then. I soon saw that this data trend was going to be something with my customers. In different companies people were talking about the value of data and what they could do with it. At the same time, I saw that they were having a lot of trouble effectively implementing the plans and ideas that came out of this within their organisations."
Sophie decided that there was a business case in training people and guiding organisations to adopt value-driven policies around data. She was convinced that the human aspect of managing data would be one of the most important pillars of successful data management.
"At first, I looked for a company where they did something like that. But after a long search in Belgium, I still hadn't found anyone. So I made the difficult choice to do it myself. Until I was 40, I had always worked as an employee, so that was exciting. I was convinced that if I didn't take the plunge then, I would never make it. So, to my father's great annoyance, I became a freelancer. He couldn't understand why I would take such a risk. There are not many self-employed people in my family, so it was not obvious to give up job security, a company car and a good salary.
So I started as a freelance consultant. That did not last long because I needed more people for the projects I wanted to do. That is how I came into contact with iAdvice (which has now become Inkubis ), with Pieter and Jeroen. Within a few weeks we were sitting around the table making plans to set up a company around my idea in their technology cluster under the Cronos Group. That is how I ended up in the technology sector despite the fact that my company actually works mainly with people and only partly with technology."
The role of people in technology
"Many companies are made up of departments, which generate data as separate silos. This structure is logical because you build teams based on expertise in a particular domain. However, there is also a major drawback to this structure; the data is only managed from the needs of your own department, even though you often need data from the other departments in order to work. An example is how customer data from sales has to flow through to admin and then to after sales service. All these departments need each other's data to provide an optimal service to that customer, without having to keep asking the customer what the billing address is, who the users are going to be, etc. Many companies do not have anyone who knows the entire flow across the silos and helps to keep the data 'healthy'.
So the question is: How can we ensure that people work together transversally to organise the entire end-to-end data flow as well as possible? That requires new things from the companies: transversal cooperation and dealing with hierarchy differently. People are used to working together within their team but not with different departments."
People also say 'garbage in, garbage out' - what do you think about this?
"That is really the case. If you don't take good care of your data, it causes all kinds of costs in a lot of places. Think of an invoice you have to send, but the data on the invoice is based on wrong data. Then the invoice will not be paid on time and you will have to re-create the invoice. So you can cause costs in many places in your business. Sometimes these are small things, sometimes very large structural problems, but it is because the underlying data is not correct, is not available quickly enough, and is not structured or understood properly. What we then do is train people to enter the data correctly, to ensure that the flow is correct for all departments and that this is also monitored. Reactively working with your data is literally mopping up the water. So we work more with people than with technology. Data cannot exist without technology but technology cannot exist without us."
Reactively working with your data is literally mopping up the water. We are therefore not working with technology, but with people. Data cannot exist without technology and technology cannot exist without us.
Really helping customers as a personal success
Looking back on your career so far, what were your greatest personal or professional successes?
"The greatest successes are what my team has been able to achieve together with our customers. The fact that you can make something out of a very small idea that even such big companies as a Brussels Airport Company, Liantis, Vandemoortele, Telenet and Proximus are working with makes me proud of course and gives me a sense of accomplishment. The best part is when you hear your customers talking about the good work you and your team have done."
To give us an idea of what Sophie and her team have solved in the projects, she gives us a glimpse of one of her projects:
"At Liantis, for example, there were three different business units that at a certain point had to come under one brand. For strategic reasons, it was important to be able to act as one organisation. This was not easy for Liantis, either technically or organisationally. They quickly decided to work with a master database for their customer data. Besides the pure technical challenge of linking the right data in a database (provided by iAdvise among others), you also had to think about the human side here. The employees were used to working with their own systems and tools and following their own processes, so there was some change management involved. Suddenly, they had to work together and agree on what was 'the right version of the truth'. Who has the right address? Who is going to decide? That requires intensive consultation and coordination among them. We then helped them to work together with the help of a network of 'data stewards'. These are gatekeepers who monitor the flow of the data. Our role, together with the client, was to determine which tasks those data stewards had and how they worked transversally in the organisation. That brought back peace and a transparent, clear division of roles. The result was good customer data that enables fast and correct service."
Interesting? You can find these and other customer cases on the QuaData website.
Challenges and dreams
What are the challenges you face?
"One of my biggest challenges is finding the right people. That has to do with the fact that the topic is still relatively 'young' and that there are few people with experience in Belgium. Many people involved in Data Governance are more on the technological side. That is why we are now mainly taking on people who actually have no experience or knowledge, which we then train in-house. This is perhaps also a warm call to everyone who has a sense of or interest in the subject and is very good at communicating!"
That sounds like you can appeal to a wide range of people. What about gender diversity in your team?
"We have a very balanced ratio of 50/50 men and women in my team. I think that is important. We have it easier, of course, because of the nature of our work; the social and human aspect attracts women more easily. We don't actually make any extra efforts for this, but we're fine I think."
What would you still like to achieve? What do you dream of?
"I hope that I can make sure that the human side of data really becomes an important issue and that companies pay attention to it effectively. This can even be extended to technology in general. I hope that a movement emerges to study, monitor and innovate the human aspects of tech. Maybe I'll write a book about it one day, although I'm really not a good writer!"
Network
Who would you like to meet and why?
"I would love to meet Håkan Edvinsson! He is a lesser known Danish man who wrote the book 'Data Diplomacy'. His ideas are very much in line with mine; that the role of data governance should be to make working with data easy. He positions the people working with data as diplomats, a bit like we do with data stewards. So a diplomat who brings other people around the table and ensures that they talk to each other and find a good solution. Data governance, it's in the word, is a form of diplomacy."
Sophie Angenot, a passionate and engaging expert, got us all excited about learning more about Data Governance. We especially remember that the human side of data is at least as important as the technical side, and we will hear more about this in the future. Want to know more about Sophie? Follow her on Linkedin!
