💡 Sometimes, instead of reinventing the wheel -...

💡 Sometimes, instead of reinventing the wheel - it’s best to find the wheel blueprint, use it, and work with it.

As professionals, we often grapple with transparency and accountability, realizing that simply providing access to data is not enough.

It may lack usability or clear guidance for interpretation, a challenge we’ve all likely encountered.🤔After a couple of paragraphs trying to elaborate on this, I felt that “someone smarter has to have written about this before better than me,” and I came to find the interesting paper “Managing Transparency Guided by a Maturity Model.It takes a more methodic approach to what I was trying to elaborate on, and it is also quite more descriptive and comprehensive than what I’d have achieved (with my thoughts only).

As you can see in Figure 1, they include a detailed analysis of elements that help or hurt transparency.

This includes accessibility, usability, informativeness, understandability, and auditability.The point that resonates strongly with me - and the paper summarizes - is that you can’t just “throw data” at people and defend that you are being transparent.

There is a required element of education around the data, and transparency also in the methodology to generate and interpret the data:In several cases, it is clear that having access is not enough, so what is the gain in having information in such a volume that is impossible to parse it, or if the information is not current, or if the information is written in an obfuscated way, as for instance when lots of acronymsWhen you, as professionals involved in data management, transparency, and accountability, strive for greater transparency, consider the different phases of maturity that the paper elaborates on.

Your role in implementing these strategies is crucial, even if you’re already providing access to all data and its gathering methods.

You can still create a forum or process for discussion around the data itself, further enhancing transparency.🔗 Link to the paper in the comments#transparency #leadership #management #accountability