Understand, Collect, Organise, Visualise, Interpret (UCOVI) are the disciplines - all five of which encompass technologies, processes, theory, science and soft skills - that organisations and people need to master in order to use data well.

For individuals, they describe all the competencies that are expected across commonly found data-facing roles, such as analytics, engineering, and data science.

For organisations, they describe the linear order of what needs to be done by IT, analytics and commercial teams to ensure data stacks are usable and of good quality, and that specific data projects produce good business results.

The contents of each UCOVI discipline and the importance to organisations of the order they appear in are described in full by the UCOVI Framework Overview.

"Our generation has the critical job of the data infant for our species."
Ben Jones - Author & Founder, dataliteracy.com

Data as a service, strategic resource and profession is still in its infancy, and its growing pains are exacerbated by an over-saturated supply market of software and technology offerings that exploit societal naivety around it.

What results from this? Organisations overspend on yet underutilize their data, and experience delivery bottlenecks from data teams with skill imbalances. Data scientists, analysts, and managers become frustrated by ambiguous and conflicting leadership priorities, and by battling a steep learning curve of competing tools and undocumented quirks in the data they work with.

UCOVI's mission is to replace this noise with signal; both to people working in data about where their focus should be, and to organisations about how they should decide strategy, foster culture, procure technology, and design effective process for data.

We commend UCOVI as a detailed, end-to-end management and development framework which is tool-agnostic, but which also champions joined-up thinking when learning skills or procuring technologies, and recognises the value of tools and softwares that are well established and widely used. Our guiding theory is complemented by over 25,000 words of content in our blog section, as well as portfolio of data vizualisation examples from open datasets. Our Best of The Rest presents a calendar of data-themed expos, conferences and events to attend in the UK, along with the best up-to-date online resources for learning skills and keeping on top of developments in this exciting and evolving area.

In adopting the UCOVI approach to mastery of data, we can support you in several ways.

For organisations, we offer a consultancy service and customised recommendations report following a drop-in fact-finding session, as a way of coaching your company through the all important Understand phase of UCOVI. We also offer in-house talks and training sessions for your organisation around the UCOVI framework and a range of widely-used technologies and approaches in data, including Power BI, SQL, ETL and statistics for business reporting (take a look at our Competency Cloud below). Finally, we can estimate and undertake specific data cleaning, analytics or system migration projects that you may wish to outsource.

For individuals looking to start or progress careers in data - whether graduates, school-leavers or transitioning from different jobs - we offer a mentoring scheme. It involves CV and interview advice, creating a self-directed technical learning programme that adapts to your current skill level and job aims, and support with building and publishing an online portfolio to attract attention from hiring companies. This mentoring scheme will be free of charge in 2023.

Email us at enquiries@ucovi-data.com for more details.