I’m not one for making New Year resolutions; in fact as I told my father-in-law the other day, “I resolved to stop making resolutions a long time ago”. However I felt that from a professional perspective it makes sense to at least have some focal points for the year ahead.

From my point of view, 2011 was a pretty good year all things considered. There were plenty of ups and downs, both from the personal and professional aspects of my life but I think, in retrospect, the downs were outnumbered by the ups.

I spent the entirety of 2011 working with a single organisation on their Solvency II programme and although challenging, this gave the year a degree of stability and consistency. In the latter part of the year I began to focus on improving my professional network and as a result I have met (albeit in most cases, virtually) some fantastic people and found the DQ community to be extremely talented, friendly and welcoming. I published my blog and stepped up my use of Twitter and I now feel that I am starting to make some progress with regards to marketing my professional services.

So what do I want to focus on in 2012?

• Learning - I already use every opportunity to expand my knowledge of all things DQ as well as improve my knowledge of related business and technical subjects, so 2012 will be no different in this respect. However this year, I may also be tempted to consider a formal accreditation to help improve my credibility to clients and help bolster my own self-belief. The wealth of information and knowledge sharing by the online communities these days is truly priceless and it means you always have access to high quality  learning materials.
• Experiencing - I stated in my DataQualityPro interview last year that I was keen to increase my experience in other industry sectors and this is something I’d certainly consider this year. Although I have been able to move from banking in my previous role to insurance with my current role, I’d be interested to experience life outside of the financial sector.
• Networking - I plan to put effort into expanding my network this year and will try to participate and contribute to the online community more. The rise in social media has been a massive advantage for me and I think anyone not involved in building an online presence (or at least benefiting from the vast amount of online resource) is really missing out.
• Building - I want to spend some time working to improve my own ‘toolkit’. By ‘toolkit’ I mean my own collection of processes and checklists for things like client engagement, data profiling, stakeholder management etc. Also, all the good reference materials like generic DQ frameworks, Governance models and various templates for standard documents that I can dip into and will allow me to hit the ground running with a new client.
• Living - Very important to me is to ensure that I am always in a position to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

Here’s to a great quality 2012!