Our modern world is built on the collection and use of data. We use it to treat our illnesses, inform our news habits, and underpin our social interactions. When governments, businesses or scientists use data, it becomes policy decisions, investment choices, medical treatments, weather advice or millions of other parts of everyday life.

Good outcomes flow from good data. What can we do to make our data as strong as possible?

Data comes in many forms – environmental measurements, survey results, financial information, medical records, maps and so much more. To make that data as useful as it can be takes work at all stages of collecting, storing and sharing the data with the systems that need it. And when it works well, it’s a foundation (hidden in plain sight) that makes great work possible.

Without people to curate datasets and build resilient systems, so many of the advances of modern life would not be possible.

The often-invisible work of data professionals is what helps create data pipelines we can trust. And such professionals deserve to be celebrated. As a data enthusiast for her whole career, Professor Shazia Sadiq FTSE is excited for recognising innovative work making data more trustable through the new Resilient Data Engineering Award from the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Supported by a consortium of partners led by the University of Queensland and the ARC Training Centre for Information Resilience, the Award recognises individuals or small teams who have dedicated themselves to building resilient data pipelines. Be they data scientists, engineers or other data stewards focused on governance, security or process efficiency, these experts work across disciplines to make the next step of innovations possible. As Shazia says, “Responsible data management builds trust and opens doors for good analysis. Without people to curate datasets and build resilient systems, so many of the advances of modern life would not be possible.”

People often find that roadblocks in complex projects have data issues at the root cause. This might be because the gender representation in a clinical trial was not properly taken into account, because the language that an AI model was trained on had a biased sample, or because one sensor’s data was relied on when other sources of data were available.

A reliable dataset – one we can trust to be accurate, safe, usable and fit-for-purpose – underpins trustable outputs, from which come trusted decisions. As we go on creating, spreading, sharing and using data in all forms across all aspects of our society, our need for expert data managers becomes greater. Awards like the Resilient Data Engineering Award celebrate the people already doing the work, and draw attention to the key role of data experts in this part of our lives that is always just under the surface.

If Australia is to do clever and useful things with data, whether in improved healthcare through personalised data, insurance through up-to-date local knowledge, science through shared geological data collections or business through better organised financial tracking, we need to invest in the advanced work of data management. The work of data wizards around us should be celebrated.

We don’t tend to notice when things go right, when disasters don’t happen and when operations run smoothly. But removing barriers and avoiding disasters is what data engineers do. For creating the conditions where innovation and safety can prosper, that’s why we are recognising them now.