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
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
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
Since tomorrow is How-long-has-it-been-since-you-used-this-data-ween, it’s time to review your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie data-pocalypse. (Please Note: This should not be confused with your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie apocalypse, for which check out the resources provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by ever-so-carefully clicking on
One of the hottest job descriptions in the data management field in the last couple of years is the position of “data scientist.” The rise of this job description matches the rise of the concept of big data – data sources that are very large in volume, change frequently, and
As this blog is largely about data, you can rest assured this post will not be about the recent federal budget standoff in the US. Instead, I wanted to outline a growing issue that relates to the false promises that many data governance initiatives deliver. One of the big challenges that
I consume so much coffee on a daily basis that I consider it to be one of my food groups. This might not be as unhealthy as it sounds since coffee beans are actually the seeds of coffee cherries, which means coffee is essentially fruit juice – and drinking a
The third part of my data governance primer series addresses data quality analysis. Don’t even start a data quality analysis until you have completed the first two steps of your root cause analysis: investigate and prioritize any potential causative factors, then start your metadata assessment. Otherwise, you may be misled
In my last post I discussed one of the important traits that I feel truly great data stewards possess – the ability to effect change. Today I want to talk about how you actually identify, train and nurture everyday workers into the role of data stewards. Most organisations don’t have
