Earlier this year Forbes published the results of yet another survey showing that data preparation continues to be the most time consuming task required for data scientists The typical data scientist spends around and hour and a half every daya collecting data sets, and another five hours cleansing data and getting it organised for analytics This leaves…
Many organizations use data governance as an aspirin. It eases an immediate pain, like a looming regulatory deadline, and makes it temporarily go away. But organizations that use data governance as a vitamin – and practice data governance systemically – gain competitive advantage. This is the premise of a new eBook and Webinar from our…
At some point in our life, most of us have been asked to take an IQ test. For people, IQ measures our ability to identify and solve various problems – language, spatial, mathematics and more. Can a business have an IQ test? Well, clearly not in the same way that a person can. For a…
A recent episode on Australian television program, Q&A, pitted Professor Brian Cox against client change skeptic and Australian politician, Malcolm Roberts. Watch the first video (edited 6 minute review, some swearing) for some classic data governance issues: Where’s the evidence? What was the source of the data? The data has been corrupted…. and more… Do…
The 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management highlights the differing approaches of older, more IT-centric metadata management vendors, and newer business oriented solution providers. Metadata has historically been a technical discipline – delivered by metadata specialists or information architects, and the available tools have historically targeted this audience. The challenge – these technologies have…
The Information Difference has released its 2016 MDM Landscape review. While you are looking at that you may be interested in the related 2016 Data Quality landscape So what were the results: Unsurprisingly, big vendors dominate the market strength chart showing that IT executives continue to prefer lower perceived integration risk over better perceived capability.…
An additional example from the same environment referenced last week. The same team of strategic consultants created a recommendation / lead generation algorithm that was intended for the customer service representatives to use to increase share of wallet by cross selling related products to appropriately identified target customers. The challenge: The recommendation engine only consumed…
One of the challenges is that the role that data plays in supporting various business goals is overlooked or ignored. In one environment, our client was looking to increase market share through enhanced customer analytics and segmentation. A leading international consulting company was engaged, at a cost reported to run into millions of dollars, to…
This was the topic I was asked to cover at the second annual Big Data and Analytic conference in Johannesburg earlier in July. Of course, the event targeted Southern African banking and insurance representatives and my focus was on our market. I do not work for a bank, although we have a number of banking…
In a landmark ruling, South African court’s have ruled against the City of Johannesburg in a billing dispute. The Court found that the onus is on the municipality, not the client, to prove the accuracy of the meter readings on which the disputed bills were based. In essence, accurate and complete billing data is at…
TD Ameritrade Chief Data Officer, Derek Strauss,gave his insights into the role of the Chief Data Officer based on his more than 20 years in data management. Where data governance is often (wrongly) associated only with a policing function, Derek used an unusual analogy to show why it is much more than that. Tragedy of…
