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
As I pen these words, the Obama administration is in the midst of an absolute debacle over the botched launch of Healthcare.gov. Regardless of what you think of Obamacare, it's hard to ignore what has become one of the most visible IT project failures of recent memory. Details are still coming
Loraine Lawson recently used the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism, in which practitioners are encouraged to pursue right views, intentions, speech, actions, livelihood, efforts, mindfulness and concentration, as inspiration for her blog post The Five-Fold Path for Ensuring Data = Information. The post offered five recommendations for ensuring that data is transformed into
Last time we explored consumption and usability as an alternative approach to data governance. In that framework, data stewards can measure the quality of the data and alert users about potential risks of using the results, but are prevented from changing the data. In this post we can look at
Within data quality circles there is often contentious debate surrounding the use of data quality software. Some practitioners believe that data quality software is a cost centre for the organisation that they can easily do without. They also believe that data quality software makes the organisation focus on repetitive, reactionary
Data stewardship is one of the prime positions in any data management organization. The business and technical stewards are the conduit between the organizing functions in the management structure (which determine policies and processes for data management) and the data management functions that perform the actual work, such as data
