For years, I have been a proponent of data quality measurement. Data quality cannot exist without management (and some would argue without governance). Meaningful data quality metrics play a critical role in managing data quality. Posts such as Don’t blow up the whale; Changing data behaviour through KPIs, and Accuracy, Completeness and Speed of Execution…
Last month I was invited to speak at the 2017 ITWeb Cloud Summit on the topic – Cloud Architecture for Big Data Analytics. The presentation was scheduled for the last slot of the day – 17:00 to 17:35 – in spite of which we had quite a good audience and, I hope, an informative and…
Last week, Henrik Liliendahl responded to questions posed to him by Jan van Til. Jan asked: Wouldn’t the world be far better of without the concept of master data? What problems are solved by it? What problems are introduced by it? The balance? So … why do we keep toiling with master data?” Henrik’s response…
I recently attended the first Africa Data Forum in Johannesburg – a three day event focusing on data science and skills development. Data governance was a key theme of the first day of the event. Research shows that data scientists typically spend an average of 60% of their time simply trying to find and prepare the…
This post is inspired by Joost van der Westhuizen, who died earlier this month after a long battle with motor neuron disease. Joost was arguably the greatest ever scrum half, and was a key member of the 1995 world cup winning Springbok team. The 1995 Rugby World Cup unified South Africans as they had never…
I was recently asked to deliver a proof of concept for a prospective client who is trying to improve the accuracy of their customer address data. Previous attempts at geocoding – adding a longitude and latitude point to each address – had been extremely difficult. The process had delivered limited results and had required months…
In many cases, regulatory pressures are used to justify investments in data governance. This is because regulations such as: King III – for corporate governance PoPI – for protection of personal information FICA – for anti-money laudering (AML) and sanctions BCBS 239 – for risk management are tightly linked to enterprise information management outcomes. Yet,…
