Tag Archives: Data Management

Manage DATA, People, Process, and Technology

dataA quick Google search seems to reveal if you manage People, Process, and Technology you’ve got everything covered. That’s simply not the case. Data is separate and distinct from the things it describes — namely people, processes, and technologies — and organizations must separately and intentionally manage it.

The data management message seems a tough one to deliver effectively. Data management interest groups have hammered at it for years, but a sometimes preachy and jargon laden approach relying on data quality train wreck stories hasn’t generally loosened corporate purse strings. Yes, financial companies’ data-first successes in the 1990s paved the way for the ’00s dot com juggernauts, whose market capitalization stems largely from innovative data management. Yet, we still have huge personal data breaches at some of our most trusted companies, and data scientists spend the bulk of their valuable time acquiring, cleaning, and integrating poorly organized data.

The first steps are often the hardest, so here’s a short, no jargon, big picture guide to getting started with effective data management in three steps:

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GIGO: Data Quality Guidelines for Application Development

There’s consensus among data quality experts that, generally speaking data quality is pretty much bad (here, here, and here). Data quality approaches generally focus on profiling, managing, and correcting data after it is already in the system. This makes sense in a daGIGOta science or warehousing context, which is often where quality problems surface. To quote William McKnight at the first of those sources:

“Data quality is no longer the domain of just the data warehouse. It is accepted as an enterprise responsibility. If we have the tools, experiences, and best practices, why, then, do we continue to struggle with the problem of data quality?”

So if the data quality problem is Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO), then I would think that it would be easy to find data quality guidelines for app dev, and that those guidelines would be lightweight and helpful to those projects. Based on my research there are few to none such sources (please add them to the comments if you find otherwise).

So, all that said here’s my cut at app dev data quality guidelines by project activity: Continue reading

A Short List of Accessible Big Data Training Options

As you’ve read on this site and many others, the database world is well into a transition from a relational focus to a focus on non-relational tools. While the relational approach underpins most organizations’ data management cycles, I’d venture to say that all have a big chunk of big data, NoSQL, unstructured data, and more in their five-year plans, and that chunk is what’s getting most of the executive “mind share”, to use the vernacular.

Some are well along the way in their big data learning adventure, but others haven’t started yet. One thing about this IT revolution is that there’s no shortage of highly accessible training options. But several people have complained to me about the sheer quantity of options, not to mention the sheer number of new words the novice needs to learn in order to figure out what the heck big data is.

So here’s a very short list of training options accessible to the IT professional who is a rank big data beginner, starting with a very brief classification of the tools that I hope provides a some context. Continue reading

What is Big Data Creativity and How Do You Get It?

Thomas EdisonIn a recent Smart Data Collective post, Bernard Marr cites creativity as a top big data skill, but what is creativity?

His point is, since big data applications are often off the beaten IT path, big data professionals must solve “problems that companies don’t even know they have – as their insights highlight bottlenecks or inefficiencies in the production, marketing or delivery processes,” often with “data which does not fit comfortably into tables and charts, such as human speech and writing.” Continue reading

A Field Guide to Overloaded Data

BugAt the very first TDWI Conference, Duane Hufford described a phenomenon he called “embedded data”, now more commonly called “overloaded data”, where two or more concepts are stuffed into a single data field (“Metadata Repositories,” TDWI Conference 1995). He described and portrayed in graphics three types of overloaded data. Almost 20 years later, overloaded data remains rampant but Mr Hufford’s ideas, presented below with updated examples, are unfortunately not widely discussed.

[Note: in March of 2021 I added one further category, bundling. – BL]

Overloaded data breeds in areas not exposed to sound data management techniques for one reason or the other. Big data acquisition typically loads data uncleansed, shifting the burden of unpacking overloaded fields to the receiver (pity the poor data scientist spending 70% of her time acquiring and cleaning data!)

One might refer to non-overloaded data as “atomic”. Beyond making data harder to use, overloaded data requires more code to manage than atomic data (see why in the sections below) so by extension it increases IT costs.

Here’s a field guide to three different types of overloaded data, associated risks, and how to avoid them: Continue reading

To SQL or to NoSQL?

DiscDrivesRecently there was a great post at Dzone recounting how one “tech savvy startup” moved away from its NoSQL database management system to a relational one. The writer, Matt Butcher, plays out the reasons under these main points:

  1. Our data is relational
  2. We need better querying
  3. We have access to better resources

Summing up: “The bottom line: choose the right tool.” Continue reading

DIY Data Dictionary: ODBC Reporting from the ERwin Metamodel

Application developers and business people accessing relational databases need data dictionaries in order to properly load or query a database. The data dictionary provides a source of information about the model for those without model access, including entity/table and attribute/column definitions, datatypes, primary keys, relationships among tables, and so on. The data dictionary also provides data modelers with a useful cross reference that improves modeling productivity.

It is particularly useful for the dictionary to be a filterable/sortable Excel document, but out of the box ERwin, one of the leading data modeling tools, includes a notably inflexible reporting capability. Luckily, it is possible to directly query the ERwin “metamodel”. However, I found the ERwin documentation a bit hard to decipher and not quite accurate. Hopefully this post will save modelers some steps in figuring out how to query the metamodel.

Here are the topics covered:

  • ODBC drivers in the ERwin install
  • Reporting experience in MS Access, WinSQL, and MS Excel Continue reading

Guiding Principles for Data Enrichment

The data integration process is traditionally thought of in three steps: extract, transform, and load (ETL). Putting aside the often-discussed order of their execution, “extract” is pulling data out of a source system, “transform” means validating the source data and converting it to the desired standard (e.g. yards to meters), and load means storing the data at the destination.

An additional step, data “enrichment”, has recently emerged, offering significant improvement in business value of integrated data. Applying it effectively requires a foundation of sound data management practices.  Continue reading

Thoughts on Healthcare Data Quality

The well-publicized problems with healthcare.gov are disturbing, especially when we remember they might result in many continuing without health insurance. Healthcare.govBut it seemed a step in the right direction when recent a news report differentiated between “front end” and “back end” problems. The back end problems were data issues, like a married applicant with two kids being sent to an insurer’s systems as a man with three wives.

Coincidently, I recently responded to a questionnaire about health care data. I’ve paraphrased the questions and my responses below. Perhaps the views of someone who’s spent a lot of time in the health care engine room might provide some useful perspective. Continue reading

Data Management: So Easy a Caveman Can Do It?

I recently stumbled upon one of The Martin Agency’s hilarious Geico caveman ads and wondered, rather geekily, why they didn’t do one about data analysis. I think if a caveman suddenly arrived in the 2010s he or she would see parallels between his life and the activities of today’s knowledge worker. When I thought it through, it seemed obvious that knowledge workers need to be more like farmers and less like hunter/gatherers if they want to achieve the full potential of business intelligence.

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