Data Tangle Interview 2:
Linda Mason

Alex Leigh

October 02 2025

4 min read

Introduction

This is interview #2 of 12 for our Data Tangle research project.

Interviewee: Linda Mason

Institution: currently a consultant with Higher Futures, previously Director of Strategy and Planning at Sheffield Hallam University

Role: Director of Planning

Scope: Reporting and insight, stakeholder management, data availability, system integration.

Summary of discussion

The data issues we discussed included:

●      The rise of strategic reporting

●      Confusion and frustration with untrusted data

●      The fix now, forget later data management problem

●      The democratisation of data

●      The perils of IT technical debt

Key takeaways

• Strategic reporting and insight was normalised as foundational for senior teams to support important decision making. This was driven primarily by the increasing marketisation of HE and the changes to how teaching was funded.

• These same senior leaders sometimes lack the appetite or – dare we say – skills to understand the nuances of the data being presented. Often planning directors are asked to provide the “simple answer” to complex questions.

• Developing an environment of data that was accessible to everyone wasn’t easy. It is too easy to focus on the needs of the “top team” leaving the rest of the university fighting for data scraps! 

• Curating trusted data sources and making them available has many benefits- the most important one being that a single source of data is being used by all.

• However this did not cover all data sources leading to daily frustration and confusion with multiple versions of the same data leading to different interpretations.

• Aligning external reporting (eg. HESA student) with internal data is extremely valuable in improving understanding in how the institution is being viewed through its regulatory returns.

• Creating these returns is difficult because of how rigidly we store and use the same data for internal use. There is poor understanding of how long it takes and how hard it is to square this circle.

• Technology solutions in the analysis and visualisation space has measurably improved how data is managed and used. 

• An absence of a coherent integration strategy has left many manual workaround and inefficient processes. Sometimes what the IT group considers priority is not what the rest of the university considers important.

Our final takeaway

Trusted and accessible data should be for the benefit of the many not the few. This starts at the top: if senior leadership do not portray a “data is an asset” mindset, it’s hard to push that bottom up.

Summary and next interview

We often say that “Data is a team sport,” and our conversation with Linda was a powerful reminder that collaboration around data isn’t just important—it must be actively practiced and visibly embedded within university culture.

We’re moving on to looking at data from an IT perspective with our next interview discussing data challenges and solutions with a Director of Digital Data & Technology.