Conversations with another data quality professional recently highlighted organisations that treat data problems as if they are an ‘Act of God’. In these cases the organisations were trying to deny their existence and were certainly denying that they could do
Mind the (data) gap!
Travellers on London Underground will be familiar with the term “Mind the Gap” which is both a visible, and an audio, warning to make sure that you do not become an unfortunate statistic on the railway – you may lose
Good data is NOT a PDF document!
Well structured data that is properly stored, managed and governed is increasingly being recognised as a way to improve business efficiency and effectiveness. However, too many people still think that information stored in electronic format is good data…
Outsourcing your data quality problems??
A recent UK news story illustrates the dangers in outsourcing your data quality problems. UK Borders Agency awarded a £30m contract to Capita to track down 174,000 supposed illegal immigrants. This quickly highlighted significant data quality problems with the wrong
We’re all human
In our increasingly regulated and controlled working lives, it is easy to feel that we are just part of a big machine, doing repetitive and dull jobs. This is particularly the case if you work in call centres or other
Decisions without information
When I saw a review of the book “Die Kunst des klugen Handelns” (The Art of Acting Cleverly) which started with the words: “Try to get through life with a minimum of information. You will make better decisions. What you
Zero data defects???
I think all people who are involved in data in any way would like to be in a position where they were no data defects and data could be relied upon 100%. Is this achievable? I regularly use a comparison
The same data… but different answer
When discussing data quality issues, we frequently address issues where inconsistent data can lead to analysis problems. The 2012 Olympics present an interesting variant where the input data is the same, but leads to a different answer…
But we’re different….
Many times throughout my career, when investigating a particular problem, people have made comments along the lines of: “But we’re the [Insert any industry name here] industry, our problems are unique, no-one has the same problems” “The challenges of [Insert
The permanence of data
A number of recent events have lead me to consider a little bit more about the permanence of data. Is data a permanent or a temporary thing?