Bob Lambert

Jazz on the harmonica

Tag: Data Management

  • The gnarly, subtle-seeming data quality question

    I’ve posted a couple of articles at my company’s blog site that reflect my view on data quality efforts: Yes, there is a business case for improving data quality, and I’ve got real business value examples. If you look for real money where you anecdotally know there are data quality problems, you’ll likely find it…

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  • Thoughts after agile training: strengthening values, reducing the cost of honesty, and growing apps

    I recently completed ScrumMaster training ably presented by Lyssa Adkins. Throughout the two-day class we appreciated Lyssa’s Zen-like, enabling, style. If her name is familiar, it’s because Ms. Adkins is the author of the book Coaching Agile Teams, one of the leading texts on the subject. I’ve participated on agile projects, but so far only…

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  • Health care data security: how bad is it?

    It is really bad, according to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute (available here with registration). The white paper, entitled Health Data at Risk in Development: A Call for Data Masking, presents the results of a survey of 492 health care IT professionals on their companies’ practices regarding use of live personal health care…

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  • Data quality and data governance lessons from national health care

    Who would want to be a national health care administrator?  Who would want the responsibility for managing health care and formulating health policy for tens or hundreds of millions of people?  It seems obvious that such decisions would rely on quality data.  A recent interview impressed upon me how much data managers can learn from a…

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  • Consider the source in health care data integration

    The Atlantic, not typically a technical rag, recently presented an article by business and economics editor Megan McArdle on health care data integration entitled “Paging Dr. Luddite”. The article brings to a mass audience an understanding of both the importance and difficulty of data integration, but the title and general anti-healthcare-professional tone seem counterproductive.

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  • Special considerations in health care data

    I’ve worked with health care data for the past few years, and in a recent conversation I realized it might be valuable to detail some of the complexities of health care data for those who might enter this growing field.  Of course these considerations aren’t unique to health care, but they are typical of the…

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  • Metadata goals, ROI, and point solutions

    Recently there has been a long, and very interesting, discussion of do-it-yourself versus third-party metadata tools on LinkedIn’s TDWI BI and DW discussion forum (membership required to follow the link). I have followed but haven’t commented, but I suppose I contributed when Information Management kindly published my article on DIY metadata. The discussion is extremely…

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  • SQL Saturday #30, Richmond Virginia, April 10, 2010

    Thanks to all who attended my presentations at SQL Saturday on April 10.  Here are the materials from my two presentations: – The Business End of Data Modeling (2.5m powerpoint presentation) – Normalize Metadata For Data Integration Analysis (5.5m full version, zip including presentation and code samples) – Normalize Metadata For Data Integration Analysis (small)…

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  • On DW federation, whac-a-mole, and integrating business data

    Information Management recently sent around their pick of best IM blog articles of 2009.  Among them was Forrester’s James Kobelius’s reaction to Bill Inmon’s “incineration of a straw man concept that he refers to as ‘virtual data warehousing (DW).’” According to Mr. Inmon, virtual data warehousing reminds him of the carnival game called whac-a-mole.  He…

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  • Coming soon: data like money

    It is a commonplace to say we should manage data like a resource. But when you think about it, data is an asset but not a resource.  Data isn’t a thing like real estate, employees, or customers, but rather it represents all of those things.  In data-geek-speak, data is a meta-resource that holds information about…

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