At a practical level, the goal of a business glossary should be to eliminate confusion caused by using the same term/word to mean different things. The business glossary creates a common language and understanding about business term in use in the business. This seems simple until one tries to do it! For example. let’s assume that…
Data engineering is the term that has emerged to describe the tasks related to delivering useful data for analytics – particularly in relation to data science. With between 60% and 90% of the effort of most big data project allocated to data engineering tasks, the role has matured as organisations found that traditional data scientists…
The digital shift is fundamentally altering the way we do business, in effect taking away the power of big business – and handing more of this power over to the consumer who is now more able to call the shots on what they want and how they want it served. Businesses are evolving to meet…
Not so long ago I received an email which, after giving my personal details, allowed me to download a Gartner report. The report talks about the difficulty organisations have understanding and explaining the role of a data steward. The author starts with mentioning some misconceptions around the role of a data steward, like: It’s a full-time…
Last week, we looked at why we need a business glossary. This week we will discuss what we capture in a business glossary. First, and most obviously, we capture business terms. Business terms A business term is a word or phrase that describes a concept that is used in a particular branch of business. Examples…
In its most basic form a business glossary is a set of definitions for commonly used business terms, aggregations, etc Many organisations may start with a spreadsheet of terms. However, over time, the need to provide context to the business glossary will in most cases require the implementation of a tool, like Collibra’s Data Governance…
It is traditional at this time of the year to look forward at trends that will shape the year. From a data perspective I believe that 2019 will be a year of finding balance between three conflicting requirements 1. Business’ continuing need for self service – particularly to support analytics. Business stakeholders looking for insights…
Today is Christmas day – I thought i would share a collection of Christmas related posts from around the Internet. Happy Christmas everyone! The 12 days of data – some interesting stats on the well known Christmas song Christmas in numbers – 10 of the best uses of Christmas visualization The relativity of Einstein, Elephants,…
As the year winds down I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the data around one of the stand-out events of this year. A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia was found to have over 1000 pieces of plastic in its stomach – and drew global attention to the…
Over the last few month’s our local (South African) DAMA chapter has been running a number of sessions discussing data modelling. Even in these days of “unstructured data” it seems that data modelling is needed more than ever. Why do we need a data model? Strategically, a good data model will help us to determine…
When you search on Google for “Master Data Management” you’ll have to look hard for a search result that is not vendor related. Most search results will be from software vendors about tooling related to MDM. Master Data Management seems to become a synonym for the implementation of a master data hub. On a discussion forum, I…
