An Expert by Your Side in Developing Data Work
We offer consulting services that help your organization gain better control over data, its governance, and development. As an independent expert and sparring partner, we support you when you need clarity in assessing your current state, confidence in strategic decisions, or guidance in building data management practices.
Our services are built on decades of experience in information management, enterprise architecture, and data strategy. We help our clients make informed decisions, foster shared understanding, and develop their operations based on data.
Audit
An independent audit provides an objective assessment of your organization’s data initiatives and clear recommendations for further development.
In recent years, many organizations have heavily invested in data utilization and information management—building data platforms, data warehouses, BI reporting systems, creating data strategies, and launching Data Governance and Master Data initiatives.
After the first set of projects, it’s wise to pause and evaluate the results. In our audits, we seek answers to questions such as:
- Are we doing the right things?
- Have the solutions been implemented correctly—both technically and methodologically?
- Are data initiatives being managed and procured effectively?
- Is the reliance on external vendors under control?
- Are we realizing the full potential of our data platform investments?
- Can our ways of working be improved?
- Are industry best practices being applied?
Ari Hovi’s consultants are among the leading experts in the field. Our clients include nearly all of Finland’s top 30 companies, as well as the largest public sector organizations.
We have carried out numerous audits—both extensive and compact—helping ensure the quality of work and resolve key challenges.
Each audit is tailored to the client’s specific situation and carried out in close collaboration with key stakeholders within the organization.
A typical audit project lasts 1 to 2 months. The outcome is an independent report and a concrete development plan that helps you harness data and analytics more effectively.
If you are looking for an independent and objective audit of your data warehouse, data quality, or data governance, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Data Quality Management & Maintenance Audit
Data quality is a critical component of successful data management. Ari Hovi’s Data Quality Management & Maintenance Audit examines data quality throughout its entire lifecycle—from input and formatting to usage and maintenance. The audit also evaluates how data quality is governed from a business perspective and provides concrete recommendations for improvement.
“Garbage in – Garbage out” is a familiar phrase to analysts, decision-makers, and IT professionals alike. Yet despite this awareness, the trap is all too common. When poor data quality is only addressed late in development, the consequences can be costly—and in the worst case, derail the entire initiative. Issues often originate not only during data entry but also within the complex transformation and transfer processes inside IT operations.
Data quality is always a business concern. Ensuring high data quality requires active management. For business leaders and units to take true ownership, IT must be able to communicate about data quality in business terms and language. Otherwise, quality becomes “an IT issue” by default—leading inevitably to failure in delivering valuable data products to the business.
Ari Hovi has decades of experience auditing and advising on data quality. Our experts bring hands-on experience from both business and IT roles within organizations where data quality was critical to success.
The Data Quality Management & Maintenance Audit is a comprehensive service that evaluates data quality processes and technical workflows against industry best practices. The result is a concrete development plan to improve data quality—from the hands of data inputters to the desktops of data users.
The Audit Includes:
Data Processing Lifecycle:
- Data production: Operational systems, data warehouses, data lakes, data product
- Data transformation: Raw data, modeled data, consumable data – “bronze, silver, and gold layers”
- Data usage: Predefined reports, self-service analytics, advanced analytics
Data Quality Handling:
- Data lifecycle stage: Development phase, production phase
- Quality dimensions: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic
- Data types: Master data, transactional data, reference data, metadata
Data Quality Governance:
- Executive involvement and ownership
- Leadership in everyday data work
- Technical implementation and quality control management (data governance)
- Self-leadership by data contributors
Data Quality Maintenance:
- Business-side data maintenance: Data accuracy, publishing, operational monitoring, decision-making
- IT-side data maintenance: Technical data flow, content handling
- User feedback loop: From data entry to data use – understanding, motivation, incentives, and guidance
- Tools and technologies for maintaining data quality
Data Strategy
A well-designed data strategy is often the best way for an organization to clarify the role of data in business and to engage top management in its effective use. It’s worth investing in the strategy process and involving both leadership and data users to ensure shared understanding of data’s value.
A data strategy should always align with the organization’s business strategy and goals. Typically, the strategy process explores areas such as:
- Data assets and their relevance to business functions
- Data ownership and role definitions in data work
- Core principles and values guiding data-related work
- Maturity and metrics of data capabilities
- State of data culture: working methods, tools, and competencies in relation to goals and KPIs
It is essential to maintain a high-level business perspective throughout the process and to remember that a data strategy is ultimately realized through people. Communication and leadership play a critical role.
We recommend that ownership of the strategy process remains with the client organization. As consultants, our role is to provide external perspective: offering sparring, challenging assumptions, and sharing experience with best practices, working models, and tools.
This approach ensures that the knowledge and skills accumulated during the process stay within the organization, enabling the strategy to remain a living document—one that evolves through regular updates.
Data Governance
