I’m delighted to announce that we have completed another round of elections to the DAMA board. This round of elections broke two records, one for the number of candidates that came forward (23) and for the total number of votes cast (353). I am particularly delighted to welcome three brand new members to the committee (in alphabetic order):

• Jenny Andrew has over 10 years of experience and a PhD working with oceanographic data. She now works in the trade union movement and is Head of Data at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy.
• Phil Jones is Marks and Spencers’ Data Governance and Quality Strategist. His experience has taught him how to build data governance from the ground up and how to make data governance engaging and business-focused and an enabler to business transformation.
• James Tucker is a career statistician, currently working at the ONS where he has led some of the department’s highest profile outputs, including Consumer Price Inflation and employment statistics. James founded the Government Data Quality Hub in 2020, a new function to set direction and lead improvements to data quality across all of government.

We now have a strong committee of highly qualified and motivated data management professionals, and together we will work to continue to build an programme of activities, events and webinars to serve our growing membership.

The last year was a good one for DAMA UK. We have trebled our membership from 250 to over 750. In part this reflects a growing awareness of the value of data management. I think that it is also related to an important exercise that we undertook last year when we developed a marketing strategy for the first time. In the exercise we really looked critically at DAMA UK from our members’ point of view and considered how we added value. The themes that stood out were CDMP, access to interesting material, networking events and mentoring. We will continue to develop our offerings along these lines.

As we develop these themes, we will be reaching out to you, our members, to contribute. If you have an idea for a webinar or a blog, please share it. If we are holding an event in your area and you have a story that you would like to present, please volunteer. If you would like to be a mentor to other data management professionals, please get in touch.

Mark Humphries, DAMA UK Chair