Data Governance Program, Project, and Conference I

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Articles: 1, 2

“IT People are like Forklift Drivers”
2008-03-12 14:25:00
One of the key components of data governance is assisting in determining who the data stewards (some say data owners) are for the critical and/or enterprise data. I tend to like the term steward because ‘owner’ implies full-control over the data, but nonetheless, the terms are generally used synonymously. It is extremely important that the data governance office provides guidance to the business on who the ‘go to person’ is for the different data domains. IT doesn’t own the data, the business does (despite what anyone may tell you!). A great analogy on how “IT People are like Forklift Drivers” is provided here by Michael R. Farnum. He wrote it so clearly that I won’t even bother to elaborate, but rather urge you to check out his blog post.

Trillium Master Data Management (MDM) Webinar
2008-03-11 18:05:00
I just received word on this webinar on 3/25 and thought I’d share the link: Trillium MDM Webinar . Just click on ‘enroll’ to the right of the first event. Feel free to leave comments about it in the comments section, and if you know of any others please post in the comments section as well.
More About: Management , Data , Master , Data Management

An Information Management Fairy Tale
2008-03-03 14:30:00
I found this video on YouTube and thought it was great. It is embedded below, but if that doesn’t work for you here is the URL: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TbzQvswrOTw Feel free to leave thoughts and comments on this below!
More About: Information , Management , Fairy Tale , Tale

Corporate Data Governance Best Practices
2007-12-13 14:45:00
I found this great data governance white paper via a press release. It surveyed many different companies working on data governance and compiled the findings into fascinating results. Take a look at the PDF here.
More About: Corporate , Data , Governance

Business Rule Concepts
2007-12-11 13:15:00
I have the book ‘Business Rule Concepts ‘ by Ronald G. Ross to give away. It retails for $39.99 at Amazon. The sub-title is “Getting to the Point of Knowledge” and it focuses on practical solutions for urgent business challenges through business rule management. If you are interested, all I’m looking for is a short post or article to share with the readers here. Send me a short email here about an experience you’ve had, something you’ve learned, something you’ve done wrong, etc in the data management field and you’ll have a really good chance at getting this $40 book for free.
More About: Sine

Where do I start?
2007-12-10 13:30:00
I came across an interesting Q&A article with Ravi Shankar, Director of Product Marketing at Siperian. The questions were about Master Data Management and Data Governance (or what they call Master Data Governance). His answer to the question, ‘What is Data Governance?’ is quite nice… Siperian calls it “Master Data Governance”, and we define it as “the orchestration of people, policies, procedures and technology to manage enterprise data availability, usability, integrity and security for business process efficiency and compliance.” (more…)
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Data Governance Framework / Whitepaper
2007-12-07 12:30:00
The Data Governance Institute has published a Data Governance Framework /Whitepaper here. There is some good information in it, whether you are just staring or have been at it for a long time.

Does anyone have experience developing a data governance strategy?
2007-12-06 13:45:00
In my post ‘8 Reasons why Data Governance fails‘, Carol S asked, “Does anyone have experience in developing a data governance strategy?”. I haven’t talked with her about this yet, but I’d like to recommend the following high-level path to launching Data Governance in an organization. This is very high level (read: quick & dirty), so you’ll need to take time and break these steps down into discrete tasks. 1. Start a Data Initiative to fix a few specific problems Before the words ‘data governance’ are ever uttered, start an initiative to fix a few problems that span the enterprise. Make sure these are problems that bother people so that you’ll get buy-in. As part of this initiative, build a business team that will work on the problems (they’ll later become your Data Stewardship Council). (more…)
More About: Strategy , Experience

Data Governance Metrics Dashboard
2007-12-05 13:07:00
Metrics are very useful for many reasons. They can help you track your progress and give you a clear, non-subjective view of how you are doing. You can build goals around them and they are incredibly useful in presentations to others not so familiar with your program. I recently found myself having to give a spur-of-the-moment presentation to our executive sponsors, and I thought I’d give you a little insight on how I quickly put together a strong presentation with information I already had. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time developing material or crunching data, it was already available to me. (more…)
More About: Dashboard , Data , Metrics , Governance

Carnival of Data Quality #1 - Make Data Quality Interesting
2007-12-04 13:03:00
This post was written by Vincent McBurney, blogger at ITToolbox and consultant for BearingPoint. A Carnival is a monthly publication of links to interesting articles on a topic - in this case data quality. It travels to different blog homes each month. We have some great DQ blogs for the first issue and at the bottom of the post we announce the host of issue #2. Here are the DQ posts for issue #1. Please visit the blogs highlighted and leave comments to show your support. An Amazon Post that’s not about the Kindle Daragh O’Brien is busy in Data Quality . Why are there so many DQ gurus in Ireland? He is part of the The International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ) and writes the entertaining IQ Trainwrecks blog. He has submitted a great article from there called oops Amazon did it again… about how a search for a Spiderman wristwatch on Amazon returns something unexpected. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. (more…)
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ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance
2007-11-20 12:00:00
Dataflux is sponsoring a free Webcast today titled “ZERO TO FIVE: A Stepwise Progression for MDM and Data Governance ”. Jill Dyché and Evan Levy will discuss: Why MDM needs to be deconstructed into discrete functional areas Why understanding business requirements means understanding functional requirements Why successful MDM depends on a solid data governance framework The webcast is Today at 2PM EST. To register, click here. This is an un-sponsored post.
More About: Data

Business Process Management Survey
2007-11-19 12:55:00
If you’re involved in Business Process Management (BPM), you may be interested in the Zoomerang survey available here. All participants receive a complimentary $5 gift card from Starbucks and five participants will win an iPod touch. This post isn’t sponsored - but I know many of us are involved in BPM so it is a decent opportunity. If you’re not sure what BPM is, here’s a little bit from wikipedia: Business Process Management (BPM) is a field of knowledge at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.
More About: Survey , Business Process Management

The Product of Poor Data Quality: Valuable Products?
2007-11-16 13:33:00
Whether your are new to the discipline of Data Quality or an old pro, you’ll likely have heard, over-and-over, that poor data quality leads to an overall poor value of the data and ultimately poor decision making. This is certainly a good point and I have no argument with it. I would like to point out, however, that there have been times when poor data quality, mistakes, and little quality assurance has led to quite valuable products. Submitted solely for your entertainment, here are some examples of the high value of poor quality. (more…)
More About: Products , Product , Poor

Getting started
2007-11-02 14:40:00
When starting a new initiative as large as Data Governance, it often helps to show its benefits. The problem with this is that when you are first starting, the benefits you are touting are merely theoretical to those you are trying to sell because nothing has actually happened yet. When my data governance program was started we never mentioned the buzz word ‘data governance’… we actually didn’t really use buzz words or try to categorize it. For us, the key was to just start a project that was fixing a major business problem. The process we developed for solving these problems became the Data Governance program. (more…)

The Death of Dirty Data
2007-11-01 13:07:00
Check out the article “The Death of Dirty Data ” published in The Canadian Underwriter (of all places). It is really well written and focuses on data quality, data governance, and data management. “Data is the foundation of practically everything that goes on in today’s organizations, and so managing the quality of data is reaching “business-critical” status.”

New Design, Your Participation, and Links
2007-10-19 14:45:00
New Design You’ve probably noticed by now that we switched up the site design earlier this week. We’ve gone with a cleaner look so that the focus is clearly on the content. We’ve also added some space in the sidebar to your right for advertisers. The vision for The Data Governance Blog is to grow into a valuable resource for data management professionals. That means our content will encompass learning about best practices, past experiences, industry events, vendors, and products. Your Participation “Build your resume by being a Guest Contributor” As part of our vision, we’re reaching out to you to help us grow. Would you like to be a guest contributor? Your writeups don’t have to be long or involved like traditional journals and magazines. We’re all about quick hitting information here. If you have a good tip or a past experience (good or bad) that you learned from, please contribute! Or, if you read an article recently and you...
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What is Data Governance?
2007-10-17 13:16:00
A very interesting article was written over at the Data Strategy Journal recently - in it they attempted to simply define Data Governance . Easy task right? Not so much. Their method for getting at some definitions was to interview consultants, practitioners, and vendors and asking them to simply “define data governance”. I like the approach of asking people in different positions to define something - this almost certainly ensures diversity since their perspectives are very different. Its a bit frightening to see the many different types of answers, but I certainly understand them since the discipline is still emerging. (more…)

Divide and Conquer
2007-10-16 13:55:00
There really is something to be said about dividing up your council to work on separate issues and then reconvening to discuss and approve the results. I’ve used this technique recently for some of the issues on our tracking sheet that ‘just won’t go away’. You probably have these too… whether they be important but nagging issues with the legacy systems or a business unit who just won’t respond so you can close something out. In any case, over time, these outstanding issues will multiply and the best method I’ve found it so assign them out to your stewards to have them worked on. I’ve also found that there are a few keys to success when doing this. (more…)
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If you haven’t yet subscribed…
2007-10-10 13:15:00
Please take a minute to subscribe to the blog here: Your email:   Subs cribe Unsubscribe   We’re looking to grow and need your support! I promise we won’t spam nor sell your email address.
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A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality
2007-10-09 16:15:00
The last session that I wanted to write about was titled, “A Business Value-Driven Approach to Data Quality ” and was presented by Richard Trapp from Avaya. For those of you don’t know of Avaya (I suspect most of you do, as you probably have one of their phones sitting right next to you), they ...
More About: Ality , Sine

Hotlink Monday - Data Governance and Management Articles
2007-10-08 15:02:00
Here is the latest news in the Data Governance Industry New Study Shows That Most Firms Struggle with Data Integrity Issues - This article states “most firms struggle with Data Integrity Issues” and lists Data Governance as part of the solution to this problem. Business Intelligence in Healthcare: The Drivers - Consultant Jill Dyche muses about ...
More About: Articles , Management , Monday

Data Governance and Quality Sessions from the IDQ Conference
2007-10-05 14:13:00
Wednesday at the conference began the series of shorter sessions. The day kicked-off with the one-hour keynote from Elizabeth Kirscher, President of Morningstar’s Data Services Business. Her presentation, titled “When Data Quality Drives Revenue“, centered around the accomplishments of Morningstar in the data management field and the road that they took to get ...
More About: Governance , Conference , Sessions

Ten Steps to Quality Data and Trusted Information
2007-10-04 14:15:00
I attended an all day session by Danette McGilvray titled “Ten Steps to Quality Data and Trusted Information ” at the IAIDQ Conference. The session provided a really nice framework that you can follow, step-by-step, to implement a strong Data Quality Program in your organization. Danette is the President and Principal of Granite Falls ...
More About: Ality

Power & Politics
2007-10-03 16:10:00
On the first day at the Information and Data Quality Conference, I attended the session, “Using Data Profiling for Proactive Data Quality Improvement“. That session was for the first half of the day, so for the second half I attended the Len Silverston session titled “Power and Politic s in Data Quality Improvement Efforts“. ...

Better Security, Faster Browsing… The Open Source movement
2007-09-30 06:00:00
If you have been following the open source movement (wikipedia page), you’re probably very excited about the products that are coming out of it. In short, open source means that the product is free, peer-edited, and often times better than its cost-based counterparts. Take Firefox for example; Firefox is a web browser that ...
More About: Security , Open Source , Open , Source , Open-Source

Vegas Conference - Data Quality
2007-09-29 23:41:00
This past week I attended the Information and Data Quality Conference at the Palms Hotel in Las Vega s . The conference material was great, and because data quality is an emerging discipline just as data governance is, there were many different approaches and methodologies to implementing data excellence in your organization. Last week I ...

Put your Policies in Writing!
2007-09-24 13:12:00
One document that is an absolute must-have for your program is the “Data Governance Policy Document”. This is a document that states what the Data Governance Office (and council) will not allow. It can also state what you do allow, but I’ve found its easier to just list what is now prohibited. ...
More About: Writing , Policies

Data Governance Article Roundup - Sept 21st
2007-09-21 20:13:00
Here are a few articles to expand your data horizon… Governance Portal This is a pretty good article in DMReview about the beginning stages of data governance. It states that, “data quality is the first step towards a proactive data governance initiative”. Its a very timely post, as I’m headed to the Information and ...
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Information & Data Quality Conference
2007-09-20 14:53:00
This weekend I’m headed out to the Information & Data Quality Conference in Las Vegas. I’m really excited about the conference because the agenda looks awesome (not to mention they also picked a great locale). For all of you unable to attend, you can view the agenda here; this is what I’m going ...
More About: Ality

3 Ways to Catch Changes to Governed Data Before they Occur
2007-09-17 16:55:00
An important piece of Data Governance is enforcing the policy and governance over data that the council has put in place. This can be one of the most challenging pieces of data governance, and it really occurs at the point where a data governance program and data quality program intersect. The position you ...
More About: Catch , Chang , Chan