Data Tangle Interview 3:
Andrea Bowes

Alex Leigh

October 16 2025

4 min read

“Data isn’t sexy – But it’s essential” 

Introduction

This is interview #3 of 12 for our Data Tangle research project.

Interviewee: Andrea Bowes

Institution: University of Hertfordshire

Role: Director of Digital, Data and Technology at the University of Hertfordshire 

Scope: Digital and Data across the university.

Summary of discussion

We sat down with Andrea Bowes to chat about her role, her journey into higher education, and the messy, misunderstood world of data. What followed was a refreshingly honest conversation about the challenges of digital transformation, the importance of data governance and quality, and why data still doesn’t get the love it deserves. 

Andrea’s remit is broad – anything digital, data or tech-related at the university falls under her watch. From laptops to software, student records to dashboards, she’s responsible for making sure it all works, securely and accessibly. But she’s quick to point out that the tech is only half the story.

“You can’t have digital without data,” she says. “They’re completely interdependent.” 

Having come from the commercial and public sectors, Andrea admits she was surprised by how far behind higher education can be. “Some of the systems and thinking seem to be up to 10–15 years out of date,” she says. “Universities lead in research and teaching, but the underlying technical architecture doesn’t always match.” 

One of the biggest issues are legacy systems and technical debt. “We buy systems, try to integrate them, fail, then build workarounds. Then we upgrade and redo the workarounds,” she explains. It’s a cycle that’s hard to break without proper enterprise architecture – or as Andrea puts it, “Lego bricks” that fit together. 

The conversation turned to the role of IT, which Andrea sees shifting from gatekeeper to enabler. “It’s not about saying no anymore,” she says. “It’s about helping the business deliver, safely and securely.” But that shift isn’t happening everywhere. Many still see IT as the fixer, the one who makes it work – no matter how complex or broken things are behind the scenes. 

And then there’s data. “We don’t have a data library,” Andrea says. “We have books, journals, but not a place where people can go and find trusted, well-defined datasets.” Instead, her team spends time pulling data from different systems, over and over again. It’s inefficient, and it stems from a deeper issue: people don’t currently see data as a shared institutional asset. 

Andrea believes this is partly down to how we teach people to use data. “Staff aren’t taught about data,” she says. “They don’t understand the impact of putting something in wrong at the start.” She shares a story from her time in policing, where officers didn’t realise the bad data, they were pulling out was the result of what they’d put in. 

We need to embed and respect governance and accountability through a shift in mindset. “We need to treat data like money,” Andrea says. “If I was managing £100k, I’d be held to account. But with data, there’s no consequence for doing it badly.” She’s pushing for enterprise architecture and governance boards that look at the impact of change to technology and data across the whole university. 

And while AI gets people excited – “I had people clambering to join the AI steering group,” she laughs – data still struggles to get attention. “It’s not sexy,” she says. “But it’s essential.” 

Andrea’s message is clear: data needs to be seen, valued, and governed properly. Because without it, we’re just rummaging through bags of Lego bricks, hoping to build something that works.

You can see from the image at the top of this article all the thematic issues Andrea is dealing with. She has a well-articulated vision for how to move from the right to the left through the disciplines in the middle.  But as she says – and this backs up what we’ve heard from our interviewees so far – data is a people business and we have to start there.