Category Archives: IT

Leader’s Data Manifesto at #EDW19: Building a Foundation for Data Science

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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 three after initial rollout of the Leader’s Data Manifesto (LDM). Since then, many widely publicized events have highlighted the value of data and metadata, and the importance of sound data management (here, here, and here). Recently at Enterprise Data World, John Ladley, Danette McGilvray, James Price, and Tom Redman presented this year’s LDM update. They reintroduced the Manifesto, recounted events of the past year, discussed strategy for the coming year, and issued a call to action for data professionals. Continue reading →

Enterprise Data Prep for Analytics: Two Principles

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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 analysis uses brand new data. Organizations can improve analytics efficiency by staging commonly used data pre-integrated for data science.

For years, large organizations have supported data warehouses, but prevailing data warehousing practices often fail when faced with “big data” volume and velocity. Still, warehousing teams in large organizations can pre-prep frequently-used internal data. Examples include reference and master data, production and sales records, and so on.    Continue reading →

Anonymize Data for Better Executive Analytics

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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 side of anonymized data that hasn’t received much press. Providing anonymous data to senior managers who don’t need access to personal data can encourage them to take a broader perspective, and thereby bring new energy to fact-based senior planning and analysis. Continue reading →

Toward an Analytics Code of Ethics

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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 my perspective, and my initial response when confronted recently by a family member on this topic. Her view from outside the field was that ethics should be a primary concern. As I’ve reflected on this conversation, I’ve come around to her point.

In recent years we’ve seen many examples of data misuse due to ethical lapses. Here’s a post that gives five examples, including police officers looking up data on individuals not related to any police business, an employee passing personal data including SSNs to a text sharing site, and Uber’s “god view”, available at the corporate level, which an employee used in 2014 to track a journalist’s location. Continue reading →

Data Integration Benefits? They’re Obvious.

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“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 us frequent.

We’ve all experienced the effects. Last week I was in a fender bender. Due to a mixup I didn’t have my insurance card with me, so I called the insurance company to get the info. They had no record of me associated with my car. It turned out that my car is insured under my wife’s name, hers under mine. Although I’ve been their customer for 25 years, and was driving my own car, they couldn’t give me insurance info. Sure, they were following good security practices. But I’m not letting them off the hook.  Continue reading →

Meaningful Requirements Start Successful Data Projects

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To me, development projects fail or succeed in the first few weeks. Once a project starts off in the wrong direction, momentum and expectations tend to prevent a return to the proper path. With today’s wealth of database options each addressing exciting new possibilities, the right choice for the application’s data foundation plays a large part in steering a project to success.

At this year’s Enterprise Data World conference, William Brooks showed the relations among different data modeling approaches, in effect detailing how to derive nine different model types from a detailed conceptual entity relationship model. Mr Brooks’ presentation hinted at a way to correctly frame up your data direction early on in a project, setting the stage for success.

According to his presentation, called “Symmetry in Modeling Approaches“, the different model types — relational, graph, dimensional, JSON, XML, and so on — all represent different perspectives on the same data relationships. Each suits a different application, like dimensional for reporting applications, data vault for data warehouses, graph databases for multi-layered search, and so on. However, if properly constructed they all map back in predictable and specific ways to a normalized entity-relationship model.

I and others write that ER modeling should be integral to requirements definition, but Mr. Brooks’ presentation implies that ER modeling can also serve as the basis for application architecture as well. Continue reading →

Start Data Quality Improvements with a New Definition

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What is Data Quality anyway? If you are a data professional, I’m sure someone from outside our field has asked you that question, and if you’re like me you’ve fallen into the trap of answering in data-speak.

To my listener, I’d guess that the experience was similar to having a customer service rep who has just turned down his simple request justify it by describing byzantine company policies.

There’s a ton of great writing available on data quality, and I in no way mean to disparage it or its value in the field. But in that writing I’ve yet to find a concise and compelling definition that’s useful to non-data professionals. I’ll review one or two prevailing definitions and then offer one that could help us unlock real data quality improvements. Continue reading →

Sound Data Culture Enables Modern Data Architectures

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Modern data architectures, by enabling data analytics insights, promise to drive order of magnitude value gains across many business sectors (here, here, and here). Not so long ago, big data presented a daunting challenge. Although tools were plentiful, we struggled to conceptualize the architecture and organization within which to capitalize on those tools. Now solid frameworks have emerged. This post reviews two promising models for modern data architecture, and discusses two key cultural values critical to their successful adoption: drive to solve business challenges and drive for universal data correctness. Continue reading →

Fixing Tableau Desktop Blue Screen or Unresponsive

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Tableau desktop (10.2.2 on Windows 7 at work) was consistently locking up my computer or causing a BSOD when I tried to start it. After struggling for a while trying to solve the problem, I found out it was because it used all resources when opening the log file, which had over time grown to 24gig. Apparently my version of Tableau desktop doesn’t periodically clean up the log files.

However, if the …/Logs folder isn’t there at Tableau startup, it just builds a new one and starts fresh, so whenever Tableau isn’t running you can just delete it. So, to make that happen automatically, I’ve added a batch file with these commands to my startup folder: Continue reading →

The PDDQ Framework: Lean Data Quality for Patient Records

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For most of us it may have slipped under the radar, but in December a groundbreaking Patient Demographic Data Quality framework was jointly released by a US government agency and the CMMI Institute.

In response to findings that many “safety-related events were caused by or related to incorrect patient identification”, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) worked with CMMI to develop the PDDQ Framework in order help organizations implement effective, sustainable data management practices around patient data management. 

Groundbreaking? Yes. As a lean framework appropriate for small business the PDDQ shows how you can rightsize the Data Management Maturity Model to match your situation. That it is freely available demonstrates CMMI’s commitment to improving data quality in healthcare. Continue reading →