Over a period of time we have created a popular series of blog posts with a collective title of the Data Zoo which explore how people’s behaviours towards data can impact the quality and integrity of data.
One of the people I have worked with for a few years, Martin T, suggested a new species should be added to the Data Zoo – the PoD or Prophet of Doom.
Want to find out more about the PoD? Then read on…
If you are a data steward (or similar) tasked with improving the quality of your organisations data, then you will be reliant on many people to help improve your data quality who will often be outside your direct team. Above all, you may have people who have more beneficial impact on data quality than their peers. These are your Data Quality Heroes,but do they know they are heroes? (more…)
A colleague said recently – “We need to concentrate on fighting the crocodiles nearest the canoe”, which is both useful to remember and also one of the reasons why some organisations struggle to address their data quality problems effectively.
In business situations a common frustration can be that staff do not follow the defined procedure, that data updates are not supplied correctly and that business change activities take more time and cost than expected.
These symptoms can indicate a deeper and more pervasive issue, namely whether your organisation has a compliance culture.
These cultural issues can result in poor business decisions, dissatisfied customers and potentially challenging questions from regulators. Above all, they can have a noticeable effect on profitability.
I went to an excellent talk recently by well known English politician Tony Benn as part of the Lichfield Literature Festival. One quotation he provided was the inspiration and title for this blog post
“Information is the best disinfectant”.
The statement on its own may not make sense, but was used in the context of explaining how the publication of information on the abuse of the parliamentary expenses system by MPs both highlighted the problem and created the solution. Once MPs realised that any abuses would be made public, and that their viability as an elected politician may be compromised, many started to voluntarily repay expenses that may have been inappropriately claimed.
For those not familiar with the story, the image above is a “duck house” claimed on parliamentary expenses by Sir Peter Viggers. Not surprisingly, he did not stand in the 2010 election!
So what does all this have to do with data quality?
There are many words and phrases which some would consider dangerous. Arguably the two which are most dangerous are the words “I’ll just….” followed by another statement.
Read on for some examples…
To paraphrase George Orwell’s quotation from the novel ‘1984’ “All of our data is equal, some is more equal than others”. If all data is treated equally, how can we prioritise our efforts?
Criticality is a method used in many situations to identify things that are of more importance to an organisation and may require more/different treatment. Examples of where criticality is used include managing physical assets, operating chemical or process plant and transport network planning.
How does the concept of criticality apply to data?
The term ‘normalisation of deviance’ refers to situations where employees become accustomed to deviation from standards/designs in engineering and industrial situations without recognising that these can be precursor events to major incidents.
This was a contributory factor in the loss of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles, the Buncefield explosion, the loss of an RAF Nimrod MR2 and many other major incidents.
Can normalisation of deviance occur with data?
The “Internet of Things” is an interesting concept that is slowly becoming a reality. The concept proposes that all physical objects are both able to connect to the internet and to communicate with each other.
In this post we consider what this may mean from a wider data management perspective.
