Tag: Data Governance
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One More Species of Overloaded Data
A while back I wrote the post A Field Guide to Overloaded Data, which publicized the work of Duane Hufford, who examined different types of overloaded data during the 1990s. Over the years his classifications of overloaded data effectively categorized data anomalies I encountered in the wild. That is until recently, when a colleague encountered…
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Data Architecture for Improved Dashboard Performance
Sometimes success seems like a data analytics team’s worst enemy. A few successful visualizations packaged up into a dashboard by a small skunkworks team can generate interest such that a year later the team has published scores of mission critical dashboards. As their use spreads throughout the organization, and as features expand to meet the…
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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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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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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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Sound Data Culture Enables Modern Data Architectures
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…
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Leader’s Data Manifesto Annual Review: “It’s About the Lopez Women”
A year ago I recounted proceedings from the 2017 EDW World conference, which included release of the Leader’s Data Manifesto (LDM). Last week’s EDW World 2018 served as a one-year status report on the Manifesto. The verdict: there’s still a long way to go, but speakers and attendees report dramatic progress and emergence of shared…
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The PDDQ Framework: Lean Data Quality for Patient Records
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…