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…
Another brief post this week on an area that we do not focus on very often: data transformation. Data transformation is a relatively mundane yet fundamental data management capability – particularly when dealing with similar data from multiple sources. Three simple examples: System A represents Male and Female and 0 and 1, while System B…
Another post following #ITWebGDPR2018 earlier this month. In his talk on the cost and compliance obligations of the GDPR, governance specialist Peter Hill made the point that risk, as it is referred to in the regulation, refers to risk from the perspective of the data subject. In other words, companies implementing GDPR, and PoPIA, must…
Last week, we spoke about Data Governance as an enabler for GDPR Compliance at the 2018 ITWeb GDPR Update. Six months after GDPR was introduced many organisations are still not compliant, with data management implementation and automation listed as major concerns. A McKinsey survey suggests that many companies put stop gap measures in place to…
Global warming. Big data. Data governance. Three terms that have been well used over the last several years, but that are frequently misunderstood. Global warming How can we be having record cold temperatures and storms on (for example) the United States East coast? The planet is getting colder, not warmer. Global warming is one of…
