01 / Strategy
Strategy and direction
Where you are now, where you need to be, and a credible plan to get there. For organisations setting out coherent data and AI strategies in serious contexts.
Strategy workData and AI enablement.
We help organisations implement data management frameworks to do more with data and roll out AI faster and more safely.
The discipline
What we mean by data and AI enablement.
Data and AI enablement is about ensuring you can use your data to enable high value use cases across data, analytics, and AI. Most organisations know they need this. We specialise in helping you put the processes and capabilities in place to do it.
Our services
We help you build the capability to govern data and AI well.
We start wherever makes sense for your organisation. Typically that means getting the strategy in place, building solid foundations, and then working alongside your teams to build internal capability and the ongoing processes and playbooks that keep governance running.
02 / Foundations
Governance foundations
The operating model, ownership, controls, and playbooks that turn governance from a slide into something that runs day to day. The bread and butter of the practice.
Foundations work03 / Capability
Capability and continuity
Bringing your stewards, owners, and domain leads up to delivery standard. Then staying alongside as the governance matures.
Capability workHow we work
We deliver work that has a lasting impact.
We believe aligning governance to real business outcomes is what makes it stick. We leave behind clear deliverables and a working operating model your team can run, not a framework that needs us to keep it alive.
Governance is tied to delivery and outcomes
Data and AI governance on its own does not bring change. Frameworks, controls, and operating models earn their place when they are connected to specific use cases and outcomes the business cares about. Every engagement is shaped around what the work is actually meant to enable.
What we leave behind is meant to be operated
Frameworks that read like theory get filed and forgotten. We build operating models, playbooks, and controls that read like instructions, sized to be picked up by the team accountable for them. The test is whether your team can run it without us.
Senior delivery, end to end
The person you meet in the first conversation is the person who does the work. Engagements are sized to be delivered without a layer of juniors in between. You get the senior practitioner throughout.
Our partnership model
Ongoing support as your governance matures.
Every engagement is designed to leave a working capability behind. Increasingly, though, clients ask us to stay alongside them and provide support as their governance matures and delivers.
Skin in the game
We stay invested in how your governance develops over time, not just in the deliverables we hand over. The relationship is built around helping your team run the practice with confidence over time.
A monthly rhythm
A predictable cadence of advisory time, planned together each month. Some months it is heavy. Some months it is quiet. The arrangement is shaped around what you need.
The same senior person, throughout
The practitioner who knows your environment stays with you. Context carries forward from month to month, so advice remains grounded in the way your organisation works.
Sized to where you are
There is no fixed package. We agree what makes sense for your organisation and your stage. As your programme matures, the shape of the partnership matures with it.
Most ongoing partnerships begin as a defined engagement, then continue. Some start as a partnership from day one. Talk to us about what fits.
The practitioner
The person behind Decaf Data.
Decaf Data is led by Michael O'Sullivan. Michael has spent over twenty years in data and information management, and founded the practice in 2019 to focus on data and AI enablement as an independent specialist.
Michael leads every engagement personally. The person you meet in the first conversation is the person who delivers the work.
Tell us what you are
trying to govern.
The shortest path to working out whether we can help is a conversation.
Book a conversation