Many people don’t know where to start with data quality. They get bogged down with questions on dimensions, ownerships, rules and tools. The problem can seem too vast to even begin making sense of their data landscape, let alone transforming it into a well-governed and high-quality asset. A lot of
For as long as I can remember, I have known about the importance of literacy. Without being able to read and write, you can only go so far in life. Imagine not being able to read warnings on prescription medicine. You are able to recognize a stop sign, but how
Sometimes you have to get small to win big. SAS Data Management breaks solution capabilities into smaller chunks – and deploys services as needed – to help customers reduce their total cost of ownership. SAS Master Data Management (MDM) is also a pioneer in "phased MDM." It's built on top of a data
Cats and dogs. Hatfields and McCoys. Business and IT. Sometimes you just need a couple of names. Great rivalries need no further explanation. At SAS Executive Conference 2014, Jill Dyché, vice president of best practices at SAS, led a panel exploring the way that business leaders and their IT counterparts
Ask any battle-hardened data quality practitioner and they will tell you that one of the leading causes of data quality defects stems from an inability to design quality into information systems. I am going to take a specific example of bad system design to explain how data defects quickly become
In the big data era, I hear a lot about new and dynamic data sources that are giving companies a wide range of opportunities – and anxiety. When industry wonks talk about the “speeds and feeds” inherent in big data, they are often talking about an avalanche of transactional or
It's hard to imagine a hotter job now than the data scientist. Supply trails demand and, as a result, there's no shortage of myths around them. But is there any real difference between traditional statisticians and what we now call data scientists? I asked my friend Melinda Thielbar, a research statistician developer at JMP (a
While big data is rife with potential, as Larry Greenemeier explained in his recent Scientific American blog post Why Big Data Isn’t Necessarily Better Data, context is often lacking when data is pulled from disparate sources, leading to questionable conclusions. His blog post examined the difficulties that Google Flu Trends
Last time we discussed two different models for syndicating master data. One model was replicating copies of the master data and pushing them out to the consuming applications, while the other was creating a virtual layer on top of the master data in its repository and funneling access through a
For most organisations, issue management is seen as an administrative chore. Scattered across the organisation, data workers diligently resolve issues often via their own local issue management process. With silos of data comes silos of maintenance, and this is a real shame because the data these systems possess is a
