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Posts on digital transformation, governance, and leadership development — focused on the organizational and cultural dimensions that determine whether technical ambitions survive operational reality.
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Garbage In, Compliance Out: The Hidden Cost of Poor Data Quality
There is a version of DPP compliance that is technically achievable without being meaningfully useful. It involves populating a digital passport with data — material composition figures, environmental indicators, supply chain references — that is structured correctly, formatted to specification, and present in the required fields. The passport exists. The QR code resolves. The auditor can see the record.
The data behind it is estimated, aggregated, unverified, or last updated three seasons ago.
The Tier Problem: Why Your Data Stops Where Your Influence Does
Ask most fashion brands how well they know their Tier 1 suppliers — the manufacturers assembling the finished product — and they will point to audit programmes, compliance certifications, and supplier codes of conduct. The picture there is generally tractable. Not always complete, not always current, but navigable. The relationship exists. The commercial leverage exists. The conversation, however imperfect, can be had.
Ask the same brands about Tier 2, the information is thinner, the verification harder, the accountability less direct.
From Data Points to Data Products: A Different Way to Think About What You Collect
Most fashion organisations collect a great deal of data. They collect it for audits, for certifications, for sustainability reports — for whatever the immediate requirement happens to be. The data gets assembled, the purpose gets served, and then — in the vast majority of cases — the data sits. It is not connected to anything else. It is not maintained. It is not treated as having any value beyond the task that prompted its collection.
This is not negligence. It is a rational response to how data collection has been structured.
Data Isn't Just for IT: Why Every Function Owns This Problem
A conversation happens, with reliable regularity, when a fashion or textiles organisation begins to take its DPP readiness seriously. Someone — usually in Sustainability, occasionally in IT — is asked to lead the work. They pull together what they can find. They discover gaps. They go looking for the data that should fill those gaps and find that nobody is quite sure who owns it, or whether it exists in a usable form, or why it was collected the way it was. They escalate.