DataFlux

Given all the talk about the problems with electronic data, you might suspect that the rise of computers caused these problems. There is a perception that when we only had manual processes and paper trails, our data problems were, if not a thing of the future, certainly less of a problem than they are today. - Read the rest of this entry »

My friends Brett and Pam made a movie. The movie is called My Date with Drew, and it’s about a guy who’s had a crush on Drew Barrymore since he was a little kid and how he has thirty days to get a date with her. It’s a great “concept,” as they say in Hollywood.

I attended a premier of the movie this past July and-never short of opinions, as those of you who read this blog have by now figured out-I pronounced it the “sleeper hit” of the summer box office and heartily congratulated Brett and Pam, and their producer, Andy, for making a really sweet-but-not-cloying film. - Read the rest of this entry »

This is my last day in London, and I am both sad at the prospect of leaving and eager to go home. Go figure. At any rate, I have had a great time; and as I lounge on the balcony of my friend’s flat, looking across the city and contemplating all the great things that London has to offer, one of the first things that comes to mind is books. - Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read an interesting and mercifully short article about a failed CRM implementation. Or was it a data warehouse implementation? Regardless, the implementation was fairly large and expensive (the exact size and cost were omitted) and the results completely disappointing. In fact, the individuals most disappointed by the implementation were those who were fired as a result of the project. - Read the rest of this entry »

Doesn’t that sound like so much finger-wagging by pedantic-sounding industry gurus and consultants? I’ve been telling clients and audiences to manage their data as an asset for over three years now. It sounds great. But no one-including a lot of the gurus busy admonishing their constituencies-really knows what it means. - Read the rest of this entry »

I have been doing a lot of thinking about Master Data Management lately (see my white paper, “Using Master Data Management to Unify Your Business,” and my webinar, “Creating a Single View of the Enterprise with Master Data Management”), especially in the context of enterprise reference data sets. On one of our projects, we have been looking at is how different data exchange partners manage their data element definitions, and how those definitions have diverged over a particular time period. - Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever really want advice-and I mean good, solid, sit-down-and-breathe-it-in advice-talk to someone who’s failed. It seems counterintuitive since we all expect to find nirvana by sitting at the feet of the master-du-jour. But there’s a lot to be learned from someone who’s fallen and stayed on the ground awhile. - Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, I put together an online presentation about demographics, geographics, and psychographics. The premise of the talk was that using data freely available from the US Census Bureau, we could derive valuable aggregate information about geographic regions, and then apply that aggregated information for marketing purposes. - Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since my first job in the data mining world I have long maintained an interest in the set of technologies that have evolved into what is now called “data profiling”. Because of the complexities of data management, clever database analysts and managers have often needed to bend the rules of sound information management principles, which has led to various data set anomalies, some predictable, and some utterly unpredictable. - Read the rest of this entry »