Data is the lifeblood of the modern organisation, providing the insights we rely on for everything from digital strategy to customer service priorities. But what happens when your data isn’t delivering as expected? Poor data quality, visibility or analytics can derail or delay critical business activities and needs to be addressed. 

Equal Experts offers a data health check service to help clients deliver better, more reliable data from their IT systems. We can audit your current data processes and provide practical guidance on what changes are needed to improve data processes. 

What is a data health check?  

The data health check is a service that Equal Experts offers to clients to help them understand and diagnose challenges they are experiencing around data. 

We’ll spend around two weeks with your team to understand what you want to achieve with data, and what improvements you can make to meet your data goals. We’ll spend time talking about your current systems and processes, and performing checks on key systems. 

At the end of this process, you’ll receive a report that contains specific, actionable recommendations. We’ll outline short and longer-term changes that you can make to improve your situation and meet your data goals. 

When do I need a data health check? 

A data health check can help if organisations spot a sudden, unexpected change in their data. For example, you might be struggling with an ongoing issue related to the speed, quality or accuracy of data analytics in your business.  

We can also help with acute data quality and performance issues, when they arise. We recently worked with an organisation that was tracking conversions in one part of their business, when the number of transactions suddenly fell, without any obvious cause. 

Our experts were able to identify an interoperability issue that was allowing some data to get ‘lost’ during the tracking process. We advised the client on how to address the immediate problem, and how to improve its data visibility and alerts processes to avoid similar issues happening in future. 

What does a data health check report look like? 

The data health check is specific to your organisation, systems and processes, so it will look different to every customer. However, we will always provide a comprehensive report to clients at the end of each data health check. 

This report will generally examine your vision (what you want to achieve), the symptoms (things that are causing problems),  causes (root causes such as technology or processes), and remedies (our recommended solutions). 

The recommendations made by our team might be very specific, such as rebuilding a particular table, or partitioning data sets differently. They can also be more strategic, for example, advising on a new data visualisation platform or BI dashboard. 

If appropriate, we can provide deep dive reports, which focus on one specific issue or area of concern. 

What happens during a health check? 

During the health check, our team will interview key stakeholders such as data users, engineers, architects and programme managers. We’ll also look at backlogs, databases, code repositories and any other information that is relevant to the health check process.

Throughout the process you can expect regular feedback, and access to a collaborative Miro board, where you can see the latest findings and insights about your data quality. 

If you are interested to know more about performing a data health check and what it could mean for your organisation, feel free to get in touch on the form below.