Andrew Brooks

July Information & Data Quality Blog Carnival

Permalink 2 comments, add yours

Whenever I get back together with my family (parents, brothers and sisters and their growing families), it does not take too long for what we affectionately term ‘toilet talk’ to rear its inappropriate, but amusing head. Steve Sarsfield, triggered those childish thoughts in his post titled "Data Quality” Technology’s Prune

Steve’s post suggests that the world of Data Quality has a similar challenge to those who are trying to overcome the stigma attached to prunes through ‘different’ marketing approaches.

Continuing on the, ‘toilet talk’ and ‘how to market Data Quality’ themes, Daragh clearly experienced some unwanted lower bowel movement when he read a blog post which attempted to create a new buzzword, ‘DQ2.0’. Loosened by this, Daragh wrote a (long) post titled ‘Buzzword Bingo (or ‘It’s the info quality stupid’)’. Daragh warns the Information and Data Quality profession about creating an even bigger gap between those we need to be educating, and the language we use to engage, and align them.

As if to prove he is not a walking talking buzzword machine, Henrik’s submitted a post titled ‘Service Orientated Data Quality’ in which the first line says ‘Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) has been a buzz word for some years’ (Enough to send poor Daragh running for the loo again!). In Service Orientated Data Quality (another pointless buzzword?) Henrik says that ‘embedded data quality functionality in different ERP, CRM, ETL solutions has been around for a long time’. IMHO the way in which ERP and CRM systems have and are still being implemented, only serves to exacerbate the DQ nightmare - more functional silo’s and even less top down information strategy! As for ETL tools having embedded DQ functions, has anyone learned how to turn them on yet? Thought so!

Perhaps it’s time for our profession to concentrate on culture, skills, attitudes and behaviors, not, technology, tools, methodologies or anything ending in ‘2.0’?

And so to the ‘Tower of Babel’ again by Henrik. I was surprised by this post, and wondered if Daragh and Henrik had been in touch since the days of DQ2.0. Henrik discusses some of the matching challenges faced when matching data from different countries. If I did not know better, Henrik was explaining Master Data Management (MDM) in business terms, without the use of the MDM buzzword! Praise the lord indeed

And as a self confessed and proclaimed ‘Obsessive-Compulsive’, Jim has submitted some of his musings from July. ‘The Very True Fear of False Positives’ talks about the ‘hot information and data quality’ topic of matching. My personal observation is that Government and big business alike, are attempting to match gigantic volumes of structured and unstructured data from a plethora of sources. In a growing number of cases, the requirement is to analyse this data and identify matches and patterns in ‘near real time’, identifying anything from terrorists, to children at risk, and other ‘issues’, which may affect brand value in e.g. the land of social networking.

Whilst all activities in our land of information and data quality (IDQ) are encouraging, I sometimes feel a little down beat that the motivations to spend big money on IDQ is still when it’s to meet an externally imposed bit of legislation, to respond to a potentially over hyped ‘fear’ or to suppress a home made data quality issue.

Let me be clear, I really don’t want Henrik or anyone else working hard to gain exposure in this exciting space, that I’m taking a pop at them. It is truly encouraging to see more and more people taking the risk of choosing what an ex. boss said to me the other week. It went something along the lines of, you have chosen a difficult track - to succeed in BI is difficult, but DQ is nigh on impossible’ there are indeed many forces out there working against us.

Through our growing IDQ community/network/profession, we are speeding up the speed of our learning. However, how do we speed up the learning of the vendors and the Businesses we so passionately wish to make successful/make money with/from?

This is a good point to mention another submission from Jim, ‘The Wisdom Of Failure’ On one hand I very much agree with all that Jim observes. Understanding how an individual accumulates and then chooses to apply wisdom is one thing, but I’d like to understand more about the learning and maturing paradox of Business in the context of IDQ.
You may also have noticed the fact that when the ‘wise crowds’ are constrained by an organisational boundary, the valuable learning from making mistakes and the true wisdom of the organisation seems to be very heavily suppressed? If this were not the case, surely we would be well down the road to putting the IDQ banner down by now - all the lessons to be learned (and wisdom) would have been applied, organisations would have matured, and they would not be making the same old mistakes over and over again?

It’s as though an organisation exists to protect itself and its 'old world ways'. I’d suggest that organisational learning and wisdom is not (currently) being used to improve the organisation and it’s operation. At best, individuals are using new wisdom only to help themselves survive within an organisation!

And so to close’

I’m reminded of Dr Eddie Obeng’s‘Money Making Machines (MMM)’ “ Our role is perhaps to continually help everyone we interact with, learn and understand they are making conscious decisions not to manage data and information as a Business asset E.g. How will their conscious decision NOT to tap in to the available wisdom and ensure they’:
- Adequately fund a Data Quality team and resource the with experienced and qualified experts “ Think >£100k for the director/manager, not £24k as I have seen advertised!
- Provide these teams with the tools needed (e.g. data profiler, adequate hardware platforms and systems access) and also the authority needed to ‘make the invisible visible’, and make the accountable become wise, or move on...
- Ensure IT is led and architected top down starting at the Businesses information need, not bottom up from the vendors imposed silo view of the world “ Remember, building a bigger silo is NOT integration :-)
- Ensure accountability for IDQ, exploitation and protection is owned by a Board level Director, and that IDQ Governance is truly about the enterprise need, not just to force a dominate functions agenda e.g. Finance
- Embed IDQ in to every project, programme and funding process, Business & IT. This includes verifying the DQ of data at the start of a BI project (Gate 1) is/will be 'fit for purpose', and HR adding IDQ in to their employee induction programme
- Provide their organisation with a single place for all IDQ concerns or issues to be logged, managed and the people and prioritisation necessary to fix root cause issues across the enterprise
- Ensure everyone in the organisation and partners/suppliers have IDQ measures and rewards built in to their contracts and personal review processes
- Etc.

‘Help them and their organisation to:
- Make more money, faster?
- Reduce the amount of money spent to make money?
- Reduce the amount of money tied up in the business?
- Meet your legal/compliance obligations?

Just like those very sobering drink drive adverts and those of the young girl who has sick in her hair after (or is it before?), a night out, appealing to common sense is failing to change culture towards IDQ. And so, as we continue to suffer from the effects of eating too many prunes, is it time for the IDQ community to develop its own shock marketing tactics?

My thanks to those who have provided the stimuli for July's Blog Carnival: Daragh O Brien, Jim Harris, Henrik Liliendahl Sorensen, and Steve Sarsfield