If you’re reading this, there’s a strong chance your organisation is on the road to data quality management maturity. One of the challenges you’ll obviously face is how to deal with all the defects discovered. Many data quality problems can be "cleansed" instantly using appropriate technology, but for a lot
"Big data isn't useful for investment purposes." So said my friend Walt during one of our recent arguments discussions. By way of background, Walt is not an über-successful 70-year-old investor who earned his chops well before the advents of Twitter, Facebook and their ilk. Rather, he's a man of a similar age to
Although its simplest definition is “data about data,” metadata can be better thought of as a label that provides a definition, description or context for data. Common examples include relational table definitions and flat file layouts. More detailed examples include conceptual and logical data models. Among its other possible uses,
Each year, I'm excited to see the awards nominations for Data Steward of the Year come in. It's not just because we enjoy seeing the program grow each year (which is true, based on the number of nominations we receive). It's also because of the variety of the nominations –
In my last post, we started to look at some of the issues with the concept of “big data governance,” especially when a large part of governance is intended to prevent the introduction of errors into data sets. Many big data analytics applications focus on the intake of numerous varied
I was speaking to one of our UK members last week who is responsible for data quality in a large public sector organisation. When we got talking about the most useful techniques she has drawn on to mature data quality in her organisation, I got one of the most common
How do employees feel about data today? It's an interesting question, and one that I address in my forthcoming book The Visual Organization: How Intelligent Companies Use Data Visualization To Make Better Decisions. As a student of data, management and technology, it's obvious to me that our relationship with data
In a previous post, I urged you to prevent the spread of the data zombie virus. However, not all viruses are bad. In fact, there are even viral outbreaks that can be good for your organization. One of my favorite books is Unleashing the Ideavirus, where author Seth Godin explains
In my last post, I noted two key issues where there is the desire to impose governance over large-scale data sets imported from outside the organization: the absence of control and the absence of semantics. Of course, we cannot just throw up our hands and say that the data is
Whilst the success rate of data migration initiatives has climbed in recent years, I still find that one of the key goals of data migration, legacy decommission, often gets overlooked. The financial benefits of shutting down the legacy environment are many. Relinquishing licenses and dormant hardware are obvious advantages of
