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…
A recent Harvard Business Review blog suggested that IT Governance is Killing Innovation. While the report title and content are controversial, there is no doubt that many IT Governance initiatives have been based on a policing, rather than an enabling approach. This post received much interest, and many comments, in the CIO Network group on…
A data quality tale of woe A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket, is, like most data quality tales, an unfortaulogy. An unfortaulogy is a series of unfortunate tales, in this case, unfortunately, thirteen, in which our data quality heroes, the Baudelaire orphans; Violet, Klaus and Sunny; struggle to survive the murderous plots of…
A couple of recent posts from Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen focused on the problem of one street having two names – certainly an issue that creates complexity for automated matching in South Africa. Two examples – English and Afrikaans street names such as Church Street vs Kerkstraat, as well as the inconsistent use of abbreviations such…
I recently had a client complaining that he was struggling with a reporting requirement because his technology platform could not cope with “Big Data”. Upon investigation I found he was dealing with approximately 20million rows from a relatively small (ten columns) table – not what I would have considered to be Big Data at all.…
Unlike many other countries, South Africa does not implement daylight savings time. Rumour has it that when the idea was first proposed the government of the day rejected it on the basis that it “would confuse the cows”, who were used to being milked at a particular time. What is the relevance for data quality?…
One thing that is constant in IT is change. Companies continously adapt or replace existing IT systems and applications in order to meet the changing requirements of business. Yet one thing that remains constant is the underlying data – typically this moves from application to application without any changes. Two key issues that arise from…
