Setting up my business - what I did... 

Part 1 - Insurance.
I have taken out Public and Product Liability Insurance. I used Ian Wallace, who does a specialised insurance policy for UK crafters, but there are others around, so if you are starting out then take a look around (Google is your friend...) and see what suits you. This one not only has the public and product liability, but also covers my stand if I am at a craft fair. It was fairly straight forward to do (though I did have to try a couple of browsers to get the site to work), and when I had sorted out a quote, I rang them up and a very helpful person discussed the options with me, and amended the quote once I decided I didn't actually need the cover for loss of stock, as most of my materials for the things I make cost less than the excess.

When I was contracting (and if I start again - which looks likely), I also have Professional Indemnity Insurance. And I have got Business Use insurance on my car insurance. I have had that for a long time - it means I can give lifts to colleagues, take stock to craft fairs, visit suppliers, and travel to clients, and be insured while I do it. But I don't take every insurance policy that I am offered - since I don't use them very heavily, things like washing machines get to take their chances (and a new machine is generally less than the cost of the insurance that is offered when you buy one).

Over the last few years, I have heard (and read) a few people saying things like 'I don't need insurance - it is just a hobby/I am only selling a few things/it is too expensive'. WRONG! Even if you buy a kit, make a few cards (or pieces of jewellery, or whatever), and sell them to get back the cost of the kit, then as soon as you start selling, you will be liable if anyone is hurt by something you have made, or is injured in any way by you while you are making and selling. And if they are injured, they can sue you, and if you aren't insured, then you can lose your house, car, possessions, and whatever else you have that has any value. I have also come across someone saying that they aren't worth suing because they don't own a house or very much; this would mean that is someone was hurt by them that the injured person can potentially have their life wrecked (or, at least, experience pain and/or inconvenience) while the person who caused it goes on their merry way saying 'oh, dear - too bad'. The courts are likely to take a dim view of that, and can take whatever income you do have for as long as it takes, so 'I am a poor ickle idiot' is not a good way to go!

Whenever I pay an insurance premium, I hope that I am'wasting' my money. But just occasionally (like when the staircase fell down in my house, or someone hit my car in the car park at Heathrow Airport and drove away without leaving a note), it is all worth while.

So, if you are starting to sell, get insured! And if you are selling food, or soaps/bath stuff, or toys - then you have a load more hoops that you must jump through, to prove that you are taking the approriate precauthions to avoid hurting your customers. This blog won't cover those, but I recommend the UK Crafts Forum as a good place to find out more.

I am  not a food blogger. But I do love to cook and eat and talk about food and so on, so maybe the occasional post about it won't hurt?

Like this one...

LEMON AND ROSEMARY CHICKEN THIGHS

Ingredients:
About a yard of rosemary (that is, roughly six six-inch sprigs picked from the bush)
A lemon
4 chicken thighs, with skin and bones.

Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 200C, or 180C for fan ovens. (I am not sure what the Fahrenheit or gas equivalents are - but if, like I did, you bought a pack of chicken thighs from the supermarket, use whatever it tells you).

You need a roasting dish big enough to take the thighs without them touching. Wash the rosemary, and tear it into pieces. Scatter it over the bottom of the roasting dish. Peel the lemon and put the peel with the rosemary. Put the thighs into the dish, cut the lemon into quarters, and squeeze the juice over the chicken. Put the squeezed bits of lemon in between the chicken pieces.

Roast it for as long as it needs - probably about half an hour.

You could use the same method with other chicken portions, or use different herbs (thyme would be good). This isn't exactly a recipe - more a method - and I am tempted to end with the Medieval injunction to 'so messe it forth'!

I hope you enjoy it.

Oops. I had good intentions - I really did. But then 'Life' happened - family crises (various, urgent and long-lasting), trying to keep up with all the other stuff I was committed to, and then a very demanding job that left me no time to do anything apart from the job. That finished earlier this year, and I collapsed a bit, slept a lot, and started to feel better and think about what I want from my life. And decided that travelling to work on Sunday afternoon, doing the admin at the weekend, and only getting out with my camera when I am on holiday (and, even then, having to keep up with emails and deal with stuff), doesn't cut it for me.

Work-life balance FTW!

(I hope...)

So, I have been thinking and pondering and doing all sorts of other things that can be done without any visible effort, and I have decided that I will not let the day job take over to the extent it did in the past, and I am going to be developing my interests in photography and jewellery making. So I am going to be a one-woman conglomerate, providing data management, photography, and jewellery to an astonished and impressed world. At least, I hope the world will react that way, but I realise that a more likely reaction is a general yawn...

And I have the intention to document how I get in here. Which will, I hope, do better than my previous intention.

Watch this space!

Volunteering for surveillance?

What do you suppose the reaction would be if your government (wherever you live) asked you to volunteer to carry a tagging device that would record where you are, every few minutes of the day? Even if they would need a warrant to access the information? But you can relax (for a moment) - I haven't heard of any government coming up with that one.

Happy now? But not for long... Because the chances are that you have already joined this 'programme'. Do you have a mobile phone? And do you keep it switched on?

There has been a lot written and said about the amount of personal data that various sites ask for, and that a lot of people hand over without any (or very few) qualms. There have been stories in the news about people losing jobs (or not getting them) because of their blogs, social networking sites, and web presence.

As a Data Management professional, should I care? Should it affect how I do my job?

Yes and no.

Yes, I should still resist the desires of the organisations I work for to store as much data as they can get about people 'because it might come in handy one day'. If we don't have a use for it now, then we should not keep it. But what if we can see a use in the short term? Say, in the next 12 months? Should we collect it now? While it is tempting, I believe that we should not. I have worked on too many 'programmes' where phase 2 never happened, and if we had added data for the use of phase 2, we would have ended up storing data that we didn't (officially) need. And people do have a tendency to want to use (analyse, run reports on) as much data as they can get that might be relevant to them. (If they really need it, then collect it when they have provided a business case and funding and cleared it with the Data Protection/Governance people.)

No, we should not collect data just because 'everyone does'. Nor should we supply it because someone asks for it - my Facebook profile shows my name, birthday, sixth form college and university attended (so people can find me), and gender. It does not show my relations who are also on Facebook, relationship status, sexual orientation, contact details, or anything else that is known to my friends but no-one else's business. Just because they ask, they don't automatically get! And if anyone demands things I would rather not provide (by making them mandatory fields), I have four options:

1. Lie
2. Decline to join (and, ideally, tell them why)
3. Give the information (but remember to ask them why they want it, where (geographically) they will hold it, and what they intend to do with it).
4. Provide it and assume that 'they' know what they are doing and will not abuse my trust.

Option 1 serves them right. Option 2 hits them where they care (losing business, members, subscribers, whatever), especially if enough people tell them they have lost. Option 3 is the slippery slope - unless someone really needs to know my dog's favourite food (or whatever) in order to provide a service to me, they have no business making my provision of that information a pre-requisite for the supply of the service. Option 4 is the worst option (but also, I think, the one most commonly adopted).

As a Data Management professional, I believe that I have a duty to fight for all non-essential fields being optional. (And making the mailing list a more attractive sales proposition does not count as essential.)

So, fellow data professionals (and anyone else who stumbled on this blog): thank you for reading this far, and will you join me on the virtual barricades that are fast crumbling under the onslaught of ill-thought-out data collection policies?

Next time someone tries to get you to tell them something they don't strictly need to know, go for option 1 or 2. And tell them why!

If you are involved in specifying data to be collected, make as much as possible optional (or leave it out altogether (you can also argue that storage may be cheap, but it will never be free!)

And never forget that data about you is yours.

Geek pride?

I am job hunting at the moment, and I just got asked what I do in between jobs. And so I explained - I maintain the DAMA-I website, I do DAMA UK committee things, I write presentations about data management for conferences... And then I paid attention to what I was saying, and started talking about photography and archaology (which are the things I like doing and reading about when I have to move away from a keyboard).

I didn't mention that I take photographs to use in presentations, nor that I have been toying with the idea of writing something about the history of data storage (which goes back about 5000 years to the clay tablets that the Babylonians used to record grain and beer going into and out of their warehouses.) One thing that data geeks learn early on is that many things are connected (or can be, with a little thought). Another is that most people don't really care all that much!

But next time you go into a bookshop, pick up a newspaper, or read a web page, spare a thought for the first person who worked out how to record that 3 bushels of grain were delivered, and 1 bushel taken out, and by whom. Because those pictures on clay tablets gradually developed into writing - and that might just make data management a much older discipline than we currently think it is?

Grace Hopper has a lot to answer for!

Not because she did so much to bring COBOL into the world (although that has paid a lot of my bills over the years).

And not for distributing 'nanoseconds' to a load of people to illustrate why satelite transmissions can seem slow.

Most of what she did is creditable, but there is one thing that really annoys me. (And it is possible that she didn't actually say it, but if not then my ire is directed at whatever idiot did!) By the way - I did think of posting this on Ada Lovelace day, but it didn't fit in with the spirit and idea of the day.

She is credited with saying "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission". Which gets quoted a lot, often accompanied by a smug, simpering little smile and an attitude of 'see, I was right and all those idiots who employ me and trust me were wrong'. If I had the power, employ and trust would be in the past tense. (You may have noticed that I am now in full rant mode.)

Lets think about this for a moment. I am going to be a little bit specific (not enough to identify the guilty party or company to anyone who hasn't seen the presentation, but quoting a real case).

I was at a conference (which doesn't narrow it down much - I have been to quite a few). I went to a presentation given by a member of the data management team from a large corporation. This person (who I will call Leslie, because that could be either male of female - see how careful I am being?) spoke for an hour about how they had initiated a 'stealth' Enterprise Data Model development at work. It was easily done - just add a little bit to each project they worked on, and gradually the thing was done. And it was so useful! People were so grateful, and used it a lot! But it had to be done this way because the large corporation had refused to authorise Leslie to develop it openly. Despite the obvious and wonderful benefits, thise idiots who controlled the money didn't want to spend it! How dreadful, and they obviously had to be circumvented! (I am paraphrasing just a little bit here...) And when it was done, Leslie told them what had been done and asked for forgiveness. The poor, over-awed bean-counters gave it (proably with suitable effulgences about Leslie's cleverness and their own unworthiness.)

OK - maybe I went a bit over the top there? You think?

So, I will summarise.

1. Leslie took money that had been allocated for a specific purpose and used it for another purpose, without the permission of the people whose money it was.
2. There may have been some pretty urgent priorites just below the projects that got 'stretched' which were hit, or couldn't be done, because the money went on the more important stuff.
3. The whole thing was concealed until it was a fait accompli, and since it was useful, it was kept on.

If Leslie had been a trader (or similar) in a financial insitution, the police and regulators would probably have been involved, and there may have been criminal proceedings. (I worked for a Swiss bank for a while - if their Ethics Statement is typical, there is no 'maybe' here - they have a very tough attitude to people who breach either the letter or the spirit of the rules. I liked it there.)

My point is that we may know best about our specific area (Data Management, in my case). We may believe we that better practices in our area will benefit the whole organisation. We will probably be right. But we don't know if there is something somewhere else that would cost about the same and have an even greater benefit. And our employers trust us, and generally give us the credit that we are doing what we say we are doing, and working to their benefit and within their rules, unless we indicate otherwise (or someone catches us out and reports it). So if we decide to go ahead and 'divert' a little effort into a pet project (with the good of the whole enterprise at heart), then we are stealing from our employers. Which isn't something to get smug about, is it?

If you want to find out more about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, you could start with her Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper.

One day, I want to visit the Smithsonian, and see the very first recognised computer bug - http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/objects/bug.htm.

On Ada Lovelace Day - Margaret Versteeg

Today is Ada Lovelace day, and over 1,500 people have signed up to blog about a women in IT who inspired them.

My inspiring woman is Margaret Versteeg, who was my mentor back when I started data modelling back in the early 1990s. Margaret taught me to think beyond the basic 'what data am I describing' level, and to think about how it would be used, and why, and also to give serious consideration to if it should be stored at all. She instilled a very firm belief that 'because we can' is NOT an acceptable reason for holding data, especially not about people. The report that came out yesterday about the appalling state of some of the UK Government databases illustrates why we must be careful (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7955205.stm). Margaret was a trained librarian (among many other skills), and taught me to order and store metadata with a view to someone getting it out again. (Very useful!)

Margaret also got me thinking about how data modelling and management is done, and why it works the way it does; this is the equivalent of a driver understanding what goes on 'under the bonnet', and has greatly enriched my work (and my enjoyment of that work).

So, on Ada Lovelace day, thank you, Margaret.