DataFlux

Like the gunfighters of the Old West, I too keep track of all my showdowns. Yep, notch number seven was carved into my data quality and data profiling belt this week. - Read the rest of this entry »

During April, I joined Tony Fisher in presenting Data Governance at a series of executive briefings. During the course of those events, we captured a number of audience questions that we were unable to address during the event, and I plan to address a number of these here in the blog. - Read the rest of this entry »

During May’s CDI/MDM Executive Summit series, our friends at DataFlux once again hoisted MDM and CDI onto the shoulders of data quality, and the result is that they all stand a bit taller.

The summit events — held in Denver, Chicago, and Minneapolis — drew a lively and diverse group of attendees. Some were practitioners, including the data architect at the retailer who confided that MDM was “her last best shot at getting my company to understand why integrated data matters.” Others were business people, including the health care executive who wanted to hear about the work involved in MDM. “Everyone knows we need it,” he said, “but no one understands what it’s going to take from a resource perspective.” - Read the rest of this entry »

I have a secret. It’s the indicator I use for ultimate project success, and it’s practically goof-proof. I can actually tell before a client project begins how successful the project will be. It’s not whether there’s an incumbent enterprise data model, formal executive sponsorship, or whether the client has established the role of Data Steward.  It’s how long it takes to get a badge.

No, I’m not kidding. - Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when the data relationships surrounding customer information are not enforced? The integrity of the data can be compromised without referential integrity (RI). RI can be built into the relational database management system or enforced with programs. Even though the relationships are maintained programmatically, we usually end up with child records that have no parent. Let’s envision that we are a vendor of a specific product (i.e. computers). - Read the rest of this entry »

This past week, I was presented with a question, "what is data quality?" After considering the question, I dove through the drafts of book chapters, columns, articles, and blog entries, to find that I don't think I have ever articulated an answer! - Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I am back from Las Vegas! All of us girls had such a great time.  The weather was warm, the slots were cranking out tickets, and the craps tables were HOT! Yahoo! Well, back to the grind. - Read the rest of this entry »

Mark, one of our managing consultants, recently remarked that our vertical industry skills were no longer as important to our clients as they used to be.

I found this hard to swallow. After all, our consultants’ industry knowledge allows us to speak our clients’ language, and most of our consultants have deep expertise in at least one vertical. Mark maintained that retail industry expertise was paramount since deep down every company is really in the retail business. - Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, what a week! I find it all-consuming when business rules are not understood prior to development, and data is jerry rigged to fit into the database. Let me give you an example! - Read the rest of this entry »

I was conducting a training class this past week on Data Governance, and during one of the break-out sessions, a topic of discussion was raised about data rules for non-persistent data. The discussion centered on the existence of data elements that are never stored anywhere, such as temporary computed values used in data transformations, or calculated values propagated to published reports. I called these "non-persistent" data elements, since they were not stored within any database management systems. - Read the rest of this entry »