When this group was setup the plan was to build a big model of all the data we needed and how this mapped to all the systems. So a 3 day meeting was setup with IS&D (Dave Hanna). It soon became clear that we were not going to draw up some big data map in 3 days (for a discussion of the database issues see this page).
So this approach was dropped and the role of the group was hastily re-hashed so that the members of the group became 'facilitators' which meant that we were supposed to solve database issues with very little resources just by influencing people who are overloaded with other work and have very little incentive to commit time.
Some people may be good at working in that way but it wasn't really my thing. It just seemed so wasteful that we were disorganised in such an inefficient way. When I looked at the hierarchy above me there just seemed to be overlaps and politics at every level.