 Hello, and welcome to Dataiversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kemp, and today we're talking to Bob Siner about his career as the president and principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and the publisher of the data administration newsletter, T-Dan.com. Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp, and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at Dataiversity, and this is My Career in Data, a Dataiversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people who help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to dataiversity.net forward slash subscribe. And today we are joined by Bob Siner, the president and principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services and the publisher of the data administration newsletter, T-Dan.com. He is also the speaker for the monthly Dataiversity Webinar Series, Real-World Data Governance, which happens the third Thursday of each month. And normally this is where a podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but today your bio is what we're here to talk about. Bob, hello, and welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on the Dataiversity podcast. In my career, I'm happy to talk about it in any questions that you ask. I love it. Well, let's dive in here then. So let's reiterate your, if you wouldn't mind, reiterating your current job title and what is it that you do in your job? Oh, wow. OK, so I am a consultant. I am a sole proprietor. I work for myself, but I help organizations to stand up data governance programs and metadata management programs and data management just in general. And I work with organizations around the country, around the United States, around the world to I like to consider that what I do is consultative mentoring. So I help to mentor my clients to become better at what they do, because at some point the consultant goes away and they need to be able to self-sustain at that point in time. So KIK Consulting, KIK stands for Knowledge is King. And I get the question all the time if KIK are my initials. I said, no, my initials are BS, and I didn't want to call myself BS consulting. But I have a real passion for data as has been demonstrated through the webinar series and the conferences and all those types of things. And so I'm here, I do both consulting and I do education and I do mentoring. And on the side, I'm also an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. So I try, I do a lot with a little bit of time. Lots of plates in the air. How long have you been a consultant for? I have had my own business for 20 years. And so for the eight years prior to that, I worked for a consultant, a small consulting company that was gobbled up by a bigger consulting company. And even before that, I worked in the corporate world. So but I've had my own business for 20 years. And how long have you been publishing the TDAN dot com? Twenty five years. It's as old as my younger daughter. And as mature as well, they're both very mature. It's it's unbelievable. Twenty five years of the publication and working with Dataversity for the last, I don't know how many. I think it's been probably at least a dozen, if not more years. It feels that way, at least. Yeah, we've been working together for a while now. And so and why the data administration newsletter? So what is that publication? So what was interesting is about 25 years ago, for those of you that were around 25 years ago, the internet was new. And the space that I was getting into in my career was around data management. And I just looked at it as an opportunity to be able to share not only my experience, but experience of other people through my publication. And that still rings true today. I mean, I will write once in a while for my own publication, but I publish things from practitioners and consultants, just the same types of people that you have on this podcast. I've been publishing them now for 25 years. It started out as being a quarterly publication, that a monthly publication. I don't have the bandwidth to do any more than twice a month, which is what the present schedule is. But I felt that there was a gap in the knowledge that was being shared. And I figured that if I could use this new medium of the internet to share stories, share examples, share ideas, it would be a great thing to do. And in little did I know that 25 years later that the publication would become such a brand and become known as it is right now. Indeed. So speaking of, so when you were a little kid, as did you think to yourself, I'm going to grow up and be a data governance consultant? No, I wanted to be an architect. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I actually went to college to become an architect. And I had my first computers for architects courses at the first school that I started that I attended to study architecture. And I decided that I liked the computers more than I liked the architecture. I did like architecture. Eventually, my wife and I were able to do to design and have built our our own home with our design. It's great, but we can't complain, you know, why did somebody put something there because we put everything everywhere? But I decided and so I went into systems and I studied computer science and I got that degree. And I it wasn't until the very first night of my MBA program that I met in the class that I was in financial accounting. I met a gentleman who was sitting directly behind me because these were all students that were working at the time and everybody introduced themselves and what they did. And it got to me and I said, I worked for a subsidiary of a company. And what I did, eventually it got to the guy behind me. And he said his name and he said, I'm the director of data management in the parent company of the company that he works for, the guy in front of me. And the professor said, do you two know each other? And we didn't know each other. And so we got to know each other. And he offered me a position as a data administrator. That's the name, the data administration newsletter, T Dan. Everything can be explained. But I went and researched what data administration was and what data management was back at that time. And I found it to be very interesting. I found it to be much more interesting than coding and developing systems. And that just set my whole career towards data management, metadata management. Eventually stewardship came around, governance came around. That's literally how I got started. Ready to mingle with your fellow data governance practitioners? Join us in Washington, D.C. this December for the data governance and information quality conference. Five days packed full of new knowledge, new friends and new strategies are yours when you register at djiq 2022 east dot diversity dot net. Wow, I don't I didn't know that. I really and I really didn't know that you went into doing this. Yeah. So it's been a very interesting. It's been an interesting evolution that way. And, you know, I left the corporate world many years ago to join a bigger consulting. Well, actually to join a small company of 20 people or 22 people that really focused on data management and they were gobbled up by a bigger company that did more than data management and they didn't emphasize data management. And eventually they were purchased and I left and just decided to go off on my own and I don't have any regrets. Amazing. So so data just became your passion. I guess you could say that. Yes. Yes, it has become my passion. And the thing that people people think, oh, he works with data. Maybe you can help me fix my computer. No, I'm sorry. Those aren't the same things. I understand that. We become the tech defaults for the family, no matter what. Certainly. So, you know, so then let me ask you kind of a tangent then, you know, what, what is it you're helping? You see, you're helping your clients to start a data governance program. Like I'm most of them don't have one at all or you're helping to mature it or. I am so glad you asked that question because what I am one of the things that I have known for is the non invasive approach to data governance. And so one of the whole court one of the court tenants of the concept of non invasive data governance is that every organization is governing their data to some extent except it's very informal. And because it's informal, it's very often inefficient and ineffective. And by taking a non invasive approach to data governance, it is to formalize some things that are already there and not try to start from scratch, not assign people into new roles, recognize that they play a role and help to formalize that role. It's a lot less threatening to the organization. So the book I wrote back in 2014 is called non invasive data governance, the path of least resistance and greatest success. And I don't know if you knew this or not Shannon, but my book has now been translated into Dutch Italian French and German. The Spanish version was just completed. And I just got the commitment from a company in China. It's going to be translated into Chinese as well. That's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. And you know what, it's because the approach is very practical. So when you say, you know, do most companies, yes, a lot of companies don't have data governance programs, but every organization is governing their data to some degree, or they wouldn't be around. They wouldn't have been as successful as I won't name any large corporations, but they've been around for a long time and they've done, they've been pretty darn successful, but they could be even more successful and they could know more about their customers and more about their products, if their data was governed better. So that's what I do is I help them to put those types of programs in place where people can be held accountable for how the data is being defined, produced and used in the organization. And there's a lot of need for that. What is your current definition of data? And how do you work with it? See, I thought you were going to ask me what my definition of data governance was. We know there too. I definitely have a definition for that, but a definition for data. Well, I would say a definition for a data element for a piece of data is just a fact or something that's been recorded about something else. And to say it's a fact is probably not even a good word to use, because if you asked me to tell you how tall I was and I told you that I was seven foot six, you might record that. It doesn't become a fact. It becomes a statement of something. So data in general, is your next question going to be how does that compare to information? No. We can talk about that for sure. But actually, let's do this. Let's talk about that. How does it compare to information? If I handed you a piece of data, I'm going to give you a piece of data right now. And that is 3,000, the number of 3,000. What does that mean to you? It's number. It's a number. In a business context, the number has some type of a meaning. It means something. It's a count. It's an address. It's a quantity. It's a dollar amount. It's an instrument rating or something like that. So you don't know. So the 3,000, the number of 3,000 to you is a piece of data. It doesn't really become information until you add context to it, until you add metadata to it. So the equation I use is that data plus metadata or data plus context equals information. And then there's a whole knowledge continuum or pyramid that you take information, you apply experience, it becomes knowledge, you apply something else and it becomes wisdom. You know, so data is just a singular piece of information. Well, so you can't even use the word information to describe data. So I just described information differently. So basically data plus metadata equals information. If you don't have the metadata, it's, you don't know what to do with the number of 3,000. It's true. So you asked me what data was. That was my explanation. That's perfect. So do you see the importance of data management and the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years and why? I see the number of jobs in data analytics increasing. Okay, so I think that the number and potentially as senior leadership in organizations either rise through the ranks or they come to the realization that data is, as you've heard, the new oil is an asset. It's all those things. There may be an increase in the number of people within organizations that are managing their data. But I think where the real increase is going to be more on the data management side, where, you know, data scientists, if your organization uses that word, you're going to see a lot more people that are data savvy. And so to come, to go through school, back in the day, back in the day when I was in school, if you studied computer science, they taught you how to program. So my advice to people that are in school is get as broad of an education, including data management as possible. There's a big advantage of places like diversity because there's a lot of education that's available there. But, you know, these days, you've got to go searching for, I mean, searching for programs that focus on data. Because there will always be a need for programmers. There will always be a need for systems support type people. The data number, the data management people numbers, I think will probably stay pretty steady. But those people who are doing analytics with the data are going to increase. Visit dataversity.net and expand your knowledge with thousands of articles and blogs written by industry experts, plus free, live and on demand webinars covering the complete data management spectrum. While you're there, subscribe to the weekly newsletter so you'll never miss a beat. So I'm going to start with you. Do you have any jobs in your specialty area around data governance? Do you see that as analysts as well? Or do you see like data governance leads or any data governance jobs increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years? Well, when I do an assessment for an organization, one of the best practices is that you need somebody to run the program. Okay. You need an administrator. You need a manager. You need a lead, whatever you call it in your organization. If you have somebody like that, it's always called out as being something that they're going to need. Somebody needs to captain the ship or run the show, basically, administer the program. So there have been several organizations recently that they did not know who was going to run the program and they needed to hire somebody. A lot of times right now, it seems to be people jumping from organization to organization. They've done data governance. They've done data governance somewhere. They go somewhere else to try to do the same thing. And a lot of times they can be successful. The problem is that you, you can't just pick up one program from someplace and implement it someplace else. So if people are continually moving around in the industry, which they really are in the data governance space, at some point that leaves openings. So there are openings for people. If you look at the job boards, there's a lot of organizations looking for data governance leads, data governance managers. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of space for that. Are there any programs that specifically teach data governance and data management? There's programs that are, that are teaching chief data officers and chief analytics officers and things like that. But that's a broad brush. They're not teaching them how to implement governance. They're going to get more of an education from going to data diversity and acquiring my learning plans on data governance, just as an example, or somebody else's. They're going to learn from real practitioners that way. So would that be your advice? People looking into get into those jobs, this, you know, network with practitioners, other practitioners, you know, how do you, you know, go, would that be going to conferences? Would that be, you know, just additional, in addition to the diversity and your website and books? I mean, that would definitely be my advice is to look into what opportunities are available. Because if your school or wherever you go to school is not gearing you towards a career in data management, then you need to go looking for advice from other people or from other places. So conferences are not only a great place to listen to, you know, people that have done this many times before who have done it really well at one place. It's also an opportunity to network with other people. And then one of the things that I love about the data diversity, about data diversity is the community. Right. So once you, and you'll find that a lot of practitioners in the space, myself included, will be very willing to share their passion with you. All you need to do is reach out. And that's how I got started. I reached out to the Larry English's of the world, the Adrian Tannenbaum's of the world, who are metadata and data quality and data governance and, or more stewardship and governance. And they were very free with their time. I think you'll find that in the community in general, people that share a passion are really willing to share their passion. And I think I would agree with that. I see people networking all the time. Because you're right. I mean, there's no direct, you know, education path to, to data governance. What's a skill set you think you use the most in your, in your job. You know what, I think it's, my ability to analyze and my ability to communicate. Communications is key. And I think it's important to have a lot of really good practitioners who have a very hard time getting their message across. And I think that I think I inherited that from my father, his ability to talk and his ability to be able to explain things. And so if there's a skill that I find myself saying, you know, boy, I felt like I did a good job in something. It's not that I had to find the right type of program. It's the way that I've communicated to leadership, even to my clients. So I'd say communication is probably one of the biggest skills. So you learned that from your dad. I don't know if I learned, I don't know if I learned that from my dad, but I think I inherited it from my dad. No, no, seriously, because he would speak. And you know, it's kind of funny and you probably didn't know this as well, but my father who passed away several years ago, he was also the publisher. He was the publisher of an online public, of an online publication, because there were no such things as online publications back there. But he was the, he was the producer, editor, publisher of a publication. And I couldn't remember him working on that. And isn't that funny to think that I didn't really think about that as I headed down the path to start my publication. I just had that ability. And I find it in my brothers and sister too, that we all seem to be able to articulate. What we're thinking pretty well. Indeed. Well, Bob. Thank you so much. And I'm afraid that I was all the time we have for today. And thanks for taking the time to chat with us. I really appreciate it. I love that I've learned something new about you. And I'm happy to share with you all these years. Well, I'm happy to share. And if anybody wants to talk to me about. Careers and data and data management. And what some of the universities are that might have programs that could help them down that path. Can I just add one more piece of advice? Oh, please. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a piece of advice that I gave to my kids when they were in school as well. And that is get experience. And that's not the first time that you've heard of that advice. But if it means while you're in school, taking an internship. Where you're being paid very little, but you're getting experience and then learn to be able to talk about your experience. And that's the key to that's key to everything because you come out of school. The first thing that they're going to want to know is, do you have experience? Can you talk about what you've done? And if you can do that. You'll be very successful. So please reach out if you have a question. And how do they reach out to you? So you're tdan.com we've mentioned, and then you're with the. Kikconsulting.com. And it's our signer at tdan.com, our signer at kikconsulting.com. If you reach out to me, I will get back to you. Love it. Well, thank you for that. And thank you again so much for taking the time to chat with us today. And for all our listeners out there, if you'd like to keep up to date on the latest podcast and the latest in data management education, you may go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. So until next time. Thank you for listening to dataversity talks brought to you by dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Thank you.