About

Barron Data Consulting is the practice of Sol Barron.

Before setting it up I spent over twenty-two years at IBM UK, working across unstructured data management, records management, process workflow and digitisation. The clients were largely multinational banks and national governments — organisations whose file estates are measured in decades and whose disposal decisions have to survive scrutiny.

The work covered the full arc rather than one slice of it: assessing organisations for readiness before any technology was chosen, designing the systems, handling the integration into what was already running, and working out how staff would actually be brought along. That last part is the one most often underestimated.

What that vantage point makes obvious is that digitising a process is not the same as structuring one. Most organisations did the first decades ago and have never done the second. The memo became an email and the file copy became an attachment, but nothing governed where any of it came to rest — so the sprawl changed medium rather than going away.

What that background is good for

Twenty-two years in the same field teaches a few things that are difficult to acquire any other way.

The first is that these are rarely technology problems. A file estate is unmanageable because nobody agreed who owns what, or because a retention schedule was written and never implemented, or because two departments use the same word to mean different things. The tooling is usually the easy part.

The second is that disposal is a governance exercise before it is a technical one. Deleting data is trivial. Being able to explain, two years later, exactly what was removed and under whose authority is the thing that takes design.

The third is that clearing an estate without changing what arrives next buys you about three years. The remediation and the structure are the same engagement, whatever order they happen in.

The fourth is that large organisations rarely fail at these projects for technical reasons. They fail because the assessment was optimistic, or the people who had to operate the result were shown it for the first time at handover.

How the practice works

Engagements start with an assessment, because scoping anything larger without one is guesswork. The output is written down and handed over — a picture of what is held, what it would take to deal with it, and what the realistic options are.

I work at solution design and governance level as well as implementation. In practice that means being useful in the room where the decision is made, not only afterwards. Where an engagement needs specialist delivery beyond what one practice should sensibly claim to cover, I will say so.

Current work includes a implementing a system handling healthcare data which is, necessarily, heavily regulated, requiring definitive policies for data retention as well as data disposal.

Who does the work

Shaya is my junior partner in the business and works with me across all aspects of project delivery — assessment runs, data collection, the parts of an engagement that are methodical rather than advisory. Having a second pair of hands on that work means an assessment that would otherwise take weeks of my time gets done properly and on a sensible timescale.

Design, governance decisions and anything that has to be defended later stay with me.

Where this sits

The practice is deliberately small, and that has consequences worth stating plainly. There is no large delivery bench behind us. We can run more than one engagement at a time, but not many — typically an assessment alongside an active build, or a programme with advisory work running beside it. Where that means waiting a few weeks for a start date, we will say so at the outset rather than discover it later.

What you get in exchange is that the person who assessed the problem is the person who designs the answer, and the person you call when something needs changing eighteen months later.

If that fits how you prefer to work, get in touch.