Author: Bob Lambert
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How to be a good client
I recently listened to Brian O’Neill’s excellent interview with Tom Davenport, headlined “Why on a scale of 1-10, the field of analytics has only gone from a one to about a two in ten years time.” The conversation covered a lot of ground as Mr O’Neill and Mr Davenport explored the reasons why. Highlights included…
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Prioritize data initiatives with the new Data Management Maturity Index
In my experience, data management is both a mission critical and an undervalued capability. Perhaps recent customer data losses and regulatory initiatives like GDPR tend to raise the stock of data maturity efforts, but it remains undervalued. For example, any Fortune 1000 firm building end-to-end processes finds that much of the cost goes to translating…
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Data Governance Meets Procurement
Why pay good money for bad data? Of course no one would do that on purpose, but I as a consultant over many years I’ve often seen it. A vendor fulfills a contract to the letter, which unfortunately allows them to deliver required reports in various, sometimes changing, formats with suspect data quality. The customer…
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Toward a Values-Based Approach to Auditing Agile Projects
By now Agile has taken over waterfall as the dominant app dev project pattern*. In many large organizations, the traditional waterfall PMO also owns Agile projects. One aspect of PMO oversight that can work against Agile culture is the project audit. If the goal of an audit is to ensure the project reflects Agile values,…
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Leadership Must Prioritize Data Quality
Data quality improvements follow specific, clear leadership from the top. Project leaders count data quality among project goals when senior management encourages them to do so with unequivocal incentives, a common business vocabulary, shared understanding of data quality principles, and general agreement on the objects of interest to the business and their key characteristics. Poor…
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Leader’s Data Manifesto at #EDW19: Building a Foundation for Data Science
It’s been a truism that data is a resource, but to prove it you just have to follow the money. As the illustration shows, the vast majority of corporate market value draws from intangible assets. Just as money is an abstraction that represents wealth, data is an abstraction that represents these intangible assets. It’s year…
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Enterprise Data Prep for Analytics: Two Principles
Data scientists spend most of their time doing data integration rather than gathering insights. In my interview with data scientist Yan Li, she said that data collection and prep takes at least 70% of her time. Obviously, there’s a lot of integration work to do on data that’s new to analytics efforts, but not every…
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Anonymize Data for Better Executive Analytics
Reading articles about data anonymization makes it clear that it is not an entirely effective security measure (here and here), but still part of a robust security capability, and required if your organization is affected by GDPR. (I use “anonymization” as a general term encompassing techniques that de-identify personal data within a given data set.) But there’s a positive…
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Toward an Analytics Code of Ethics
In data management and analytics, we often focus on correcting apparent inability and unwillingness on the part of business leaders to effectively gather and capitalize on data resources. With that perspective, we often see ethics as a side issue difficult to prioritize given the scale and persistence of our other challenges. At least that was…
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Data Integration Benefits? They’re Obvious.
“At least 84 percent of consumers across all industries say their experiences using digital tools and services fall short of expectations.”* That quote headed a recent article by David Roe on the role of data integration in digital workplace apps. However, the opening quote reflects the pervasive dearth of integrated data among the companies most of…